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LIBRARY 


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Latest Date stamped below. A 
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Pt, 
ate 


PAUL OF TARSUS 


BOOKS BY 
T. R. GLOVER, M.a., D.D., LL.D. 


FELLOW OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, AND 
PUBLIC ORATOR IN THE UNIVERSITY 





Paul of Tarsus 

Progress in Religion to the Christian Era 

Poets and Puritans 

The Pilgrim 

The Nature and Purpose of a Christian Society 
Fesus in the Experience of Men 

The Jesus of History 


PAUL OF TARSUS 


BY 


Poh Beals Conds CWE 





GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


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JOSEPHO LARMOR 
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CUIUS AMICITIA VITA BENIGNA FUIT 


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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2021 with funding from 
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Ir was at Simla in August 1916 that the lines of this 
book were laid, but for myself it is chiefly associated 
with America—with classes in a summer session at 
the University of Chicago in 1920; with lectures on 
the Earl Foundation in the Pacific School of Religion, 
at Berkeley, California, in October 1923; and again 
with the Carew lectures in the December of that year 
in Hartford Theological Seminary in Connecticut ; 
and lectures on the Dowse Foundation in Cambridge, 
Massachusetts. 

To write down these names is to recall the kindness 
of friends and to think of days in pleasant piaces, not 
to be remembered without happiness. Nor does this 
exhaust the tale of my indebtedness. For my friend, 
the Reverend George William Harte, of Tyndale 
Chapel, Bristol—another place of indelibly happy 
memories—made the indexes for me, and my daughter, 
Elizabeth, read my proofs. It has been well said 
that the Latin for “‘ modern daughter” is im loco 
parents. 


St Joun’s CoLLEGcE 


6th May 1925 


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CONTENTS 


INTRODUCTION F : M = ° 
CHAP, 
I. Tarsus p : d . 
II. JerusaLEM. - : : : . 
III. Damascus . . : : ‘ ‘ 
IV. “Nor nwavinc Mine Own Ricureousness” 
V. Tue Lire or OBEDIENCE 
VI. “’THe PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL” 
VII. Tue Cuurcu ° ; : ; 
VIII. Tue Human Paut : 4 - 
IX. Tue Love or Curist . ; x 2 
X. THe ConsuMMATION : : : 
InpEx or Bisiicat PassacEs . A ‘ 
GENERAL INDEX . ° ° ° ° 


PAGE 


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47 
72 
94 
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198 
223 
245 
253 


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PAUL VOR TARSUS 


INTRODUCTION 


“He is certainly one of the great figures in Greek 
literature.” So says Mr Gilbert. Murray} and 
whether one judge the great writers by the number 
of their readers age after age, or of those whose 
minds they shape and whose lives they guide, whether 
we measure them by their gift of transcending their 
disciples and commentators, and suggesting perpetu- 
ally new avenues of thought and experience to be 
explored, or whether we apply to them the test not 
merely of knowing what to say, but how to say it, 
Paul stands among the greatest of the Greeks. It 
might surprise him to find himself so placed; they 
too might be surprised; but who of them, apart from 
Homer and Plato, has had so wide and so long an 
influence, who has opened up more of the real world 
to men, whose words have lived more in the hearts of 
their readers ? 

He is no easy author. Homer is simpler, and 
Plato’s thought is plainer tofollow. Paulcan be simple 
and direct, but when he soars, it is into another 
region of beauty than Plato knew, and with wings 
uneven. A bilingual man pays for his gifts, and 
the Semite who thinks in Greek never quite forgets 
Jerusalem and the speech of Canaan; his genitives 
accumulate, his threads break, and it is in losing his 
way that he arrives. In any case a man who, like the 
Greek Odysseus, has seen in the spiritual world so 
many cities of men and learnt their mind, who has 


1 Gilbert Murray, Four Stages in Greek Religion, p. 146. 
A 1 


2 PAUL OF TARSUS 


wrestled with so many religious vocabularies, will not 
be easy to follow. It is remarkable that Jesus was, in 
a sense, a man of one locality, Paul a man of all the 
world; the one might have been expected to show 
marks of race and place and time, and he does not; 
the other, who should, one would guess, be the easier 
to understand, is incomparably harder. Everywhere 
men understand Jesus at once, though they do not 
quickly exhaust his mind. Paul baffles the reader with 
his wealth of suggestion, the temporal and the per- 
manent are so involved in his mind and in his speech. 
It is treasure in earthen vessels, as he suggests; but, 
as in the greatest artists, it is hard to take the treasure 
from the vessel. Style is thought, and Paul’s style 
perplexes the attentive reader, partly because Paul 
does not attend to it, partly because in him as in his 
gospel, Jew and Greek, barbarian and Scythian, are 
one. However well we may know the elements, genius 
has the power, as Browning saw : 


Out of three sounds to make 
Not a fourth sound but a star; 


and for most minds such transcendental alchemy is 
impossible. 

But his chief difficulty for us of to-day is not in 
the vessel but in the treasure. While he accumulates 
height and depth and half spiritualizes them, while he 
insists on the mystery of Christ, we, trained in another 
age, and sharing its limitations as well as its emanci- 
pations, hesitate and are uncertain; we have not his 
experience, or we have it only in part, and, pupils of 
a scientific school, we mistrust ourselves, our experience, 
and our vocabulary. He comes upon us with the 
splendid air of one who has found his freedom and 
can speak it in a language without drawbacks; and 
such language of such men inevitably makes our age 
uncomfortable in its uncertainty. 

Yet, like Plato, he remains to charm and to challenge. 


INTRODUCTION 3 


He has the same gift of interesting men in himself, 
without intending it, without quite knowing it. He 
shares also with Plato a progressive habit, which leaves 
his thoughts here undeveloped, there superseded, while 
he sweeps on into a new plane of intuition or vision ; 
he is so keen on the last discovery that he forgets the 
old, and is too eager altogether to care about recon- 
ciling them. In another sense, all his life is given to 
this task of reconciliation, yet he never overtakes it ; 
revelation comes too quickly for tradition and inherit- 
ance to be wholly re-interpreted. In the midst of the 
process comes a spasm, and the work is wrecked ; 
things are left more ill-adjusted than they were 
before. The old, the half-developed, and the over- 
powering fresh gain lie there together; and the man 
is too exultant in his new knowledge to notice that he 
is inconsistent, or to care. After all Paul and Plato 
had this in common; neither sought to develop a 
Paulinism or a Platonism; they both pursued Truth ; 
and to keep abreast of Truth leaves a man little time 
to be consistent with himself, and little wish for it. 
Hence any Paulinism or any Platonism, if correct and 
consistent, will so far misrepresent Paul and Plato.} 
The only -ism that will represent either of them is a 
habit of mind, a temper, an attitude to life, a faith in 
God and in what God does. Results will be wrong, 
however carefully drawn; the man must be known ; 
his failures, his false starts, his entanglements will be 
more illuminating than another’s achievements, for 
they will reveal him. It is a wise saying: 


Errare mehercule malo cum Platone quam cum 1stis vera 
sentire.” 


1 Cf. F. G. Peabody, The Apostle Paul and the Modern World, 
p- 109; “ Consistency is the last of virtues that Paul would claim.” 
2 Cicero, Tusculans, 1. 17, 39. 
















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TARSUS 


I 


Wuen Paul told Claudius Lysias that he was a 'Tarsian, 
‘a citizen of no mean city ’—a city “not incon- 
spicuous ’—he was not speaking idly. Legend said it 
was founded by one of the Argives, who, with ‘Trip- 
tolemos, sought Io, when she was turned into a cow. 
Xenophon had been there some four centuries or so 
before Paul’s day, and found the palace of a Cilician 
King Syennesis. The Greek mercenaries of Cyrus 
signalized their stay first by looting in the city, and 
then by a mutiny which Clearchus and Cyrus settled by 
a 50 per cent. rise in pay.2. Antiochus Epiphanes, it 
is inferred, settled Jews as colonists there in 171 B.c.® 
The place had a name for a famous Stoic school; and 
visitors from other Greek regions of the Mediterranean 
found a pleasing conservatism in ‘Tarsus, as Chicago 
people perhaps do still in Boston.4 Modern travellers 
speak of the scenery round Tarsus as magnificent ; and 
it is remarked that Paul never alluded to it. Neither 
did Xenophon, apart from its bearing on military 


affairs. ‘The ancients were not apt to expatiate, with- _- 


out provocation, upon scenery. An episode recurs to 
the reader of Plato, where Socrates is taken to a pleasant 
spot outside Athens—to hear a speech read;*® and 
when his guide tells Socrates that he speaks of the 

1 Strabo, c. 673; Dio Chrysostom, Oratiom, xxxill. 41. 

2 Anabasis, 1. 2, 23, 263 ili. I-21. 

8 W.M. Ramsay, Cities of St Paul, p. 181. 


“ Dio Chrysostom, Oration, xxxiii., § 48 f. 
5 Plato, Phaedrus, 230, B-E. 


6 PAUL OF TARSUS 


place like a stranger, he owns that he is a stranger, 
trees and flowers cannot teach him, men can; so he 
stays with men in the city. Gratuitous description of 
scenery In prose was a trick of the rhetorical school ; 
and what survives of such attempts makes the reader 
content that there is so little. 

If we follow Socrates’ example and ask what men had 
to teach in the city, we learn that long before the Roman 
times ‘Tarsus was a centre of Greek culture.1 Strabo, 
who wrote or compiled his geography about the 
Christian Era, says that the ‘Tarsians had an enthusiasm 
for philosophy, and for education generally, that out- 
went Athenians and Alexandrians or any other citizens 
of what we should call university towns; nearly all 
the students in ‘Tarsus are natives, strangers rarely 
come, but the Tarsians go abroad to study, and they 
are rather apt to stay abroad when they have got their 
education. In other such places, Alexandria excepted, 
the students are strangers, and the natives rarely study 
either in their own universities or anywhere else— 
which suggests modern Cambridge and Oxford, while 
Tarsus is perhaps more like Aberdeen. Strabo speaks 
of Stoic studies flourishing, and mentions by name five 
eminent Stoics, one a friend of Marcus Cato, another 
of Caesar; he adds the names of a great Academic (the 
tutor of Augustus’ nephew Marcellus), and of others, 
all men of Tarsus; ‘‘ Rome is full of them and of 
Alexandrians.” 2 

Tarsus was a “free city’ from Antony’s time; it 
paid no tribute, and it had self-government.’ Dio 
Chrysostom * speaks of the workers in sailcloth at 
Tarsus, and of their repute for being many in number 
and disorderly in ways, and their uneasy position in 
the city, of which however they are not full citizens ; 


1 Mommeen, Provinces of Roman Empire, Vol. ii. p. 122. 

2 Strabo, cc. 673-675. Cf. Walden, Universities of Ancient Greece, 
p- 70; Holm, Greek History, iv. p. 447. 

* Appian, B.C., v. 7. * Oration, XxxIv. 21-23. 


TARSUS 4 


and he urges the concession of full rights to them. 
Readers of the Acts will recall that Paul in his day 
worked at the trade; and the suggestion is easy that 
Aquila and Priscilla may have been ‘Tarsians them- 
selves (Acts xvill. 3). 

The river Cydnus, Strabo tells us, flows through the 
city, hard by the young men’s gymnasium—a cool and 
headlong stream. With one last scene on this river 
recalled to mind, we may pass from the “ not incon- 
spicuous city’ to its most famous citizen. It was 
here that Cleopatra came to meet Antony “ sailing up 
the river Cydnus, in a barge with gilded stern and out- 
spread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to 
the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay 
at full length under a canopy of gold, dressed like Venus 
in a picture, and beautiful boys, like painted Cupids, 
stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were attired 
like Sea Nymphs and Graces, some steering at the 
rudder, some working at the ropes.”” So Plutarch; and 
English readers will know where to turn for a more 
splendid version drawn, like so much else, by our 
greatest dramatist from Plutarch.? 

That Paul’s family, or at least his father, enjoyed 
Roman citizenship, he tells us himself, when he informs 
Claudius Lysias that he was “‘ born free.” How. the 
citizenship was gained, whether for services rendered 
or for money, or on the manumission of an enslaved 
ancestor, we do not know. Paul says more of the 
Jewish traditions of the family ; they were Benjamites, 
as he twice tells us (Phil. iii. 5 ; Rom. xi. 1), Hebrews of 
of the Hebrews; and it has been an easy and profit- 
less conjecture that he owed his Hebrew name Saul 
to memories of the tribe’s one king. ‘The social and 
financial position of the family has been much discussed, 
and we cannot quite escape it; but the fact that Paul 


1 See Varro, de Re Rustica, 11. 11, 12, on the cloth, cilicium. 
2 Plutarch, Life of Antony, c.25. Antony and Cleopatra, Act Il. 
sc. ll. 


8 PAUL OF TARSUS 


at one time worked at a trade has to be ruled out as 
evidence. It appears that it was usual for a young 
Jew to learn a trade; at least the rabbis are quoted 
as inculcating this upon parents.t It has been con- 
jectured that Paul’s father may have been concerned 
with the sale of the fabric in the markets of the East. 
Travel seems to have come naturally to Paul, but that 
cannot be pressed as an argument. He alludes to his 
“kin ”—Junia and Lucius bearing Roman names, and 
others Greek ;? and the list in which they appear is 
now in his Epistle to the Romans, whatever may be 
the value of guesses as to how it came there. But 
with a people, who shifted about the world as the 
Jews have done since Alexander the Great, there is no 
telling where these “kin” belonged. A nephew lived, 
or at one time resided, in Jerusalem (Acts xxiii. 16). 
It was common for Jews, then as now, to have Gentile 
names, which sometimes suggest their own. ‘Thus 
Joshua might be Hellenized as Jesus, or transformed 
into Jason or Justus.2 A Roman citizen took a Roman 
name, as the satirist reminds us in his sardonic picture 
of the change of Dama into Marcus,‘ to the great 
improvement of his character. But however the name 
Paullus came to the family whom we are now con- 
sidering, Paul inherited the name, and, as we shall see, a 
good deal of the Roman with it. 

It has been pointed out that, while Jesus was con- 
spicuously a man of fields and country towns, Paul, as 
plainly, in allusion, metaphor, and illustration, shows 
that he is a man of the city, and, further, that he had 
been a boy there.> If we trace back his metaphors to 


2 Conybeare and Howson, S¢ Pau/, vol. i. p. 51. 

* Romans xvi. 7, 11, 21. See pp. 58, 179. 

* Cf. Acts xvii. 6; Rom. xvi. 21; Col. iv. 113; Joseph Justus, 
Acts i. 23. 

« Persius, 5,79. See Deissmann, Bible Studies, p. 314; Ramsay, 
Paul, pp.81- 88. 

§ Deissmann, S¢ Paul, pp. 74, 75- 


TARSUS 9 


their first appearance in his mind, we shall see the 
boy on his way through the streets of Tarsus stopping 
to watch the builders at the new house—how the 
wise master-builder (architecton) draws the cords and 
lays the foundation and another builds on it, and how 
sometimes the work of the latter has to be taken 
down and done over again ; and the boy hears that the 
man’s wages are reduced for his bad work (1 Cor. 111. 
10). Or a wrong-headed labourer breaks brickwork 
down and has to rebuild it (Gal. ii. 18). Later in life 
he has many hints of the scene, disguised in our 
English version by the rather obsolete word edify. He 
has the boy’s interest in shops—none the less that in 
the Orient there were no huge plate-glass windows, 
no departmental stores with hordes of shop-girls, but 
that barter prevailed, and all the shops of a kind were 
in a row and more or less open, as they are in the 
bazars of Smyrna or Calcutta to-day. Here are the 
butchers (1 Cor. x. 25) with the perplexities that grow 
for a boy about the distinctions between Kosher and 
other meat, and the carcases of pagan sacrifice; there 
again are other traders, huckstering, wheedling, and 
bargaining, illustrating everything that led the Greek 
to his contempt for ‘“‘shop-keepering”’ (kapeleuo). 
Paul later on repudiates that style of procedure in 
recommending the word of God; it does not need 
tricks ; give it sunlight and sincerity and God looking 
on, and it will do (2 Cor. 11.17). It is noted, further, 
that he uses metaphors of debt, and of the market, 
and “ calculates.” } 

Slaves no doubt abounded, as they did not in 
Galilee, though ‘Tarsus certainly must have had 
much fewer than Rome; and Paul, like other boys in 
Greek and Hellenistic towns, probably got his first 
conceptions of the world’s variety of races from the 
sorrowful figures of slaves. He does not allude to the 
slave-market, but he must have seen it; and he does 


1 Ramsay, St Pau/, p. 286. 


10 PAUL OF TARSUS 
speak of the branded slave (Gal. vi. 17). One can 


imagine the small boy’s bright interest in recognizing 
one of the Greek letters he was learning on the side of 
a man’s brow, and how indelible would be the memory 
of his first discovery of the cruelty that men could 
show tomen. Another day, soldiers marched through 
the streets perhaps, rough enough, though not con- 
querors in a free town; and perhaps, as a very small 
boy to-day will find acute pleasure in a Salvation 
Army band, the small Saul was impressed with 
the trumpets, and it was explained to him that the 
trumpet was blown to tell the soldier when to get ready 
for march or battle (1 Cor. xiv. 8). Later on, he 
draws many illustrations from the soldier’s life (2 Cor. 
x. 2-5; 2 Tim. il. 3, 4). The custom-house perhaps 
did not claim the boy’s attention at the beginning, any 
more than the tax-collector ; but they were part of the 
city-life, and Paul the traveller must eventually have 
seen as much as he wanted of the former at least 
(Rom. xii. 6-7). The publican comes oftener in the 
talk of Jesus. 

But if shops and slaves and soldiers formed a part 
of ‘Tarsus life, a Hellenistic city had more variety to 
offer in its amusements. We have already had an 
allusion to the gymnasium of Tarsus. It was a matter 
of amusement to the Greek that Orientals were so 
fussy about being seen naked; they laughed at the 
very white bodies of their captives, when Agesilaus 
had them stripped to be sold.t’ On their side the Jews 
were shocked at Greek nudity. In the reign of 
Antiochus Epiphanes, among the lawless enormities of 
Jason, who bought the High Priesthood and set about 
Hellenizing Jerusalem and making a little Antioch of 
the sacred city, the historian notes with horror the 
establishment of a gymnasium and the introduction 
of the broad-brimmed Greek petasos. ‘‘ He gladly 
planted a gymnasium under the acropolis itself, and 

1 Xenophon, Agesilaus, i. 25-28; Hellenica, Ill. iv. 16-19. 


TARSUS II 


the strongest (or noblest) of our youths he brought 
Tmcerethe Greek hat” 4).(2 Macc.) iv. 6). To. the 
modern in the West all this seems very innocent, but 
in the East race and faith are in a turban to this day. 
“In God’s name wear red for blue,” says Mahbub 
Ali to Kim—the Muslim colour not the Hindu. 
Bombay has some sixty varieties of turban, all with 
significance, and pictured in the Gazetteer of the city. 
But Jerusalem and Tarsus were far apart; distance, 
environment and the lapse of two centuries changed 
things. Children are not particular about caste or 
colour if the other boy has points of contact; and 
there is something about the running of a race that 
captures the boy’s mind, even if it is naked Greeks 
—or, even worse, Hellenizing half-Greeks—who are 
running. If we cannot certainly answer the question, 
Was he allowed to watch the heathen at their athletics? 
it is easier to answer the question, Did he watch 
them? 

Paul, it must be recognized, kept something of the 
boy’s mind to the very end, the boy’s easy gift of 
*‘ making friends with fellows,” the boy’s keenness—his 
very tangents of thought show it. ‘* Don’t you know 
that the runners in the stadium all run and only one 
gets the prize? Run to win!” (1 Cor. ix. 24). And 
this reprobate Jew, who had in his boyhood watched 
the Greek heathen at their sports, forgetful of old 
Jewish proprieties and Greek indecencies, goes on to 
make it clear, not only that he had been interested in 
racing, but in boxing. He does not “ run uncertainly,”” 
he says, and we can believe it; he will know which 
end of the course he has to reach and keep his eye on 
it, and “run to win.” When he boxes he will not 
waste his blows on the air; the other man shall know. 
that he can punch (so men found who ventured on 


1 See A. T. Olmstead, in American Fournal of Theology, vol. 
xxiv. No. 1; Edwyn Bevan, Jerusalem under the High Priests, 


P+ 79 


I2 PAUL OF TARSUS 


controversy with him) ;1! and he will keep fit like a 
good athlete. The whole passage is illuminative. 
Paul is not ‘‘ drawing illustrations from local interests ” 
any more than Jesus thinks out allusions to “ natural 
objects”; the racing and the boxing interested 
him. Of course they did; and one might guess 
that there were Tarsians, who, if they read his letters, 
could have borne personal testimony to his not 
hitting the air when he fought as a boy, as well as to 
his keenness in running. From the energy of the man, 
his extraordinary powers of physical endurance, the 
vitality of his mind, it is not too much to conclude 
that if he took no part as a youth in the gymnasium, 
the stadium and the wrestling ground, it was not 
because he would not have liked it; the reasons must 
be looked for in nationalism and religious tradition, 
and the life of renunciation began before his ’teens. 
One is not a Hebrew of Hebrews for nothing. But even 
in antiquity children played, and fought, and ran 
races. Epictetus tells what they played; they were 
*‘sometimes athletes, sometimes monomachi, some- 
times gladiators.” 2 

The theatre was another feature of Greek life to be 
found wherever the Greek went, an obvious factor in 
all Hellenization, pagan through and through. Run- 
ning was human, boxing, too, and soldiering ; but the 
stage was idolatrous, the play was a heathen ceremony 
in essence, its arguments were drawn from legends of 
false gods, and the performance was liable to be 
grossly indecent—“ a ligge or a tale of baudry.” Yet 
the Jews, as we learn from an inscription, had a special 
place assigned to them in the theatre at Miletus. If 
the son of strict Jews might not go to the theatre, 
he knew all about it. ‘We are made a spectacle 
(theatron) to the world, to angels and to men,” he says 

1 Cf. Peter at Antioch, Gal. ii. 


* Epictetus, Diatridai, III]. xv. 5. And they quarrelled over their 
games, too, from Patroclus onward, J/iad xxiii. 86-88. 


TARSUS 13 


(1 Cor. iv. 9); he plays Hecuba himself, with all the 
universe looking on; the sight 


Would have made milche the Burning eyes of Heaven 
And passion in the Gods. 


Life in a Greek or Oriental town was carried on 
a good deal out of doors. ‘“* The city teaches.the 
man,” as Simonides said—dNus avdpa diddoKce. Paul 
began to learn what we call his universalism in the 
streets of Tarsus as a boy, too human to feel that the 
other boys were not human too, whatever he was 
taught within doors, even if actually for a while he 
persuaded himself to believe it. We must not forget 
that life in a Hellenistic city might influence him by 
moods of antipathy. ‘The family was obviously a strict 
one, as Pharisee in outlook and practice as the foreign 
soil allowed; the discipline and the name implied 
division and separation, and Greeks were not always 
genial to Jews. We must not forget the training 
of the home. But here, too, in spite of itself, the 
household helped to broaden the boy’s outlook. It 
was inevitable. 

The two great languages of the nearer East were 
Greek and Syriac, to which the Aramaic of Palestine 
is closely akin. ‘Tarsus stands where the two met, a 
frontier town. Westward, thought and speech were 
Greek ; eastward, and very far and significantly east- 
ward, thought and speech were Syriac. Westward lay 
philosophy and literature. Syriac seems never to have 
had much literature till it became a Christian speech. 
How far eastward it reached is not always realized, but 
_of late years Syriac books and script have been found 

in'Turkestan. Ihave myself been present at a Christian 


1 I am'told that this is fanciful; but Philo a generation earlier 
in Alexandria was interested in Greek amusements, e.g., in the theatre 
(and the psychological effects of music there, which he noticed himself), 
in bull fights (and the conduct of the bulls). See Drummond, PAilo 
Fudaeus, vol.i. p. 17. 


14 PAUL OF TARSUS 


service in Calcutta, when a liturgy was conducted 
in Syriac by men calling themselves Syrians, whose 
ancestors had been Christians in India longer perhaps 
than the Anglo-Saxon stock, Christian or pagan, had 
been in England at all. In China, at Si-ngan-fu, 
stands a Syrian Christian monument, conspicuous 
among all the inscriptions of the Church. Greek and 
Aramaic in some form were inevitable in Paul’s upbring- 
ing. Luke tells us, further, that Paul made a speech 
at Jerusalem in Hebrew without preparation (Acts xxi. 
40). Conceivably the speech may have been in 
Aramaic; Yiddish is often called Hebrew to-day. It 
is likely that Paul learnt Hebrew and read the Old 
‘Testament in Hebrew, but it is clear that he knew the 
book best in the Septuagint version. His religious and 
ethical vocabulary, his quotations, alike show that it 
was not the Hebrew but the Greek Bible that was in 
his heart. A hint of a play on words, as impossible 
in Greek as in English, suggests that he at least 
sometimes thought in Aramaic; ‘“‘long hair” and 
“‘ disgrace’ are not an assonance in Greek, but in 
Aramaic they are.? It is hardly thinkable that, in 
all his intercourse with Roman officials and magistrates, 
he knew no Latin. There was not the Greek’s 
contempt for that barbarian tongue to stop him, and 
even Greeks, though shaky now and then like Plutarch 
in Latin grammar, knew more of the language than 
they pretended. 

An argument has been put forward by a learned 
German scholar that Paul “ did not come from the 
literary upper class, but from the artisan non-literary 
classes, and that he remained with them”; that he was 

1 Cf. Adolf Deissmann, St Pau/, pp. 101-103; Wendland, Die 
hell.-rom. Kultur, p. 354, on his habit of interweaving fragments of 
the LXX. with his own words; H. A. A. Kennedy, St Paul and 
Last Things, p. 56. 

2 1 Cor. xi. 143 sa’ra and sa’ra, or tsa’ra. 


* Sir W. Ramsay holds that Paul may have preached in Latin at 
Lystra. 


TARSUS 15 


a tent-maker “‘ whose trade was the economic founda- 
tion of his existence,” who worked night and day 
(1 Thess. ii. 9; 2 Thess. iii. 8), who wrote in “ large 
letters ” (Gal. vi. 11), clumsily and awkwardly, with 

‘a workman’s hand deformed by toil,” and preferred 
an amanuensis.1/ Poverty it is plain that Paul knew, 
at all events in Corinth and in Thessalonica? But 
Wendland is probably right in denying Deissmann’s 
thesis outright, and asserting categorically that Paul 
was not of the lower class, either in social status or 
education, and that to count his language vulgar 
and non-literary is an unjustifiable application of 
Attic standards—though he allows that Paul’s is not 
yet a triumphant style. He certainly was suspected 
by Felix of being able to lay his hands on money 
(Acts xxiv. 26); and in Rome he had his own hired 
house (Acts xxvill. 30). 

We learn from the Acts that, at an age which we 
are left to conjecture, Paul removed, or was taken, 
to Jerusalem. ‘There, according to Paul’s speech as 
given by Luke, Paul was brought up at the feet of 
Gamaliel (Acts xxii. 3). Whatever be the part of Luke 
or of other historians in reporting the speeches of 
their heroes, there need be no hesitation in accepting 
the statement that Paul was the pupil of Gamaliel. 
Though we are not told at what age he left Tarsus 
and came to Jerusalem, the question is not without 
importance. ‘The only available evidence is internal. 
That Greek was his native speech is proved, says 
Wendland,* by his familiarity with the Septuagint. 
Casual references and broken quotations will tell what 
text or edition of a book a man has read; and these, 
with passages, where Paul bases arguments on the 
Greek which would not rest on the Hebrew, prove that 


+ Deissmann, S¢ Paul, p. 50. 2 Compare Acts xx. 34. 

® Wendland, Die hell.-rom. Kultur, p. 353. His use of the LXX 
is not that of a labourer, it may be | 

4 Wendland, Die hell.-rom Kultur, p. 354. 


16 PAUL OF TARSUS 
he used the Greek Bible. Deissmann ably deduces 


from his being a man of the Septuagint a later date 
than childhood for his leaving Tarsus ;1 he must have 
spent a good part of his youth, or at least his boy- 
hood, there. His ‘‘ sovereign command of Hellenistic 
colloquial” points in the same direction, and that 
general familiarity, which we have remarked, with the 
ordinary life of a Hellenistic town. It is held by 
another scholar that all his Hebraisms are due to the 
Septuagint, with the addition of a few Hebrew words, 
while now and then, if he happens to translate from the 
Hebrew, a hint of its structure can be seen in his 
Greek. 

Greek then is his mother-tongue, and Greek his 
milieu—in neither case the Greek of the great classical 
period; he belongs to the Graeco-Roman world, but 
his background is Semitic, and his religion Hebrew. 
He thus stands at the centre of things, equipped for 
the very task he was to undertake, the interpretation 
of Christ to the heart of the world. But before we 
consider his capture by Christ, we have to look more 
closely at the influences that played upon him and to 
see, if possible, how far they shaped him. If our 
course for the time is devious, if it yields little in 
positive statement about the man himself, it will enable 
us to see a little more of that Graeco-Roman world, 
which, if it did not influence him as directly this way 
or that way as some have held, was yet his home and 
his battleground. The time should not be quite 
wasted. 


§ II 


The interests of ordinary life in a Hellenistic town 
we have seen to be among the early associations 
of Paul. But Hellenistic life and Greek thought are 
two different things; the Hellene remained a different 

1 Deissmann, St Paul, pp. 92, 93. 2 Deissmann, /oc. cit. 


TARSUS 17 


creature from his neighbours who shared his ideas and 
his outlook, different even if they had any element 
of Greek blood in their veins. The theatre and the 
gymnasium passed more easily into men’s habits than 
Greek discipline into their minds. Men in that age 
of travel and talk picked up in popular lectures and 
conversation more ideas than they ever thought out, 
much as people do in newspapers and novels and on 
trains to-day. ‘They learnt the language and even 
something of the style of Greece; but the Greek spirit 
was not so easily caught. No example perhaps can 
be so telling as that of Plutarch himself ; he was Greek 
by blood and Greek by birth; he was steeped in the 
history, the literature, and the philosophy of the older 
Greece ; but, however much it might have surprised 
him to be told so, no one could be much further from 
the mind and outlook of Plato. 

When we turn to Paul, the obvious starting-point is 
given by two quotations. Luke tells us (Acts xvii. 28) 
that Paul in his address in Athens quoted half a 
hexameter, tov yap Kat yévos éoper, “ for we are also 
his offspring ”—which, curiously enough, comes both 
in the Astronomical poem of the Cilician Aratus 
(translated into Latin by Cicero), and in the hymn 
of the Stoic Cleanthes. ‘Till we have decided how far 
Luke, like other contemporary historians, felt and took 
a freedom in re-modelling the speeches of his char- 
acters, or (as Sir William Ramsay insists) reproduced 
the addresses of Peter and Paul with strict faithfulness, 
we cannot build much on this single fragment. A safer 
instance of quotation is the whole line which Paul 
himself cites in writing to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 
XV. 33). 

Pleipovaew nOn xpyjoP oprriar Kakal. 


The rendering of our English version—‘ Evil com- 

munications corrupt good manners ”—hardly suggests 

its source in a comedy of Menander. It does not 
B 


18 PAUL OF TARSUS 


follow that Paul knew the original comedy.! If Paul. 
is responsible for the epistle to ‘Titus in its present 
form, he quoted a line of Epimenides upon the Cretans, 
a line that, like several in Shakespeare’s plays and a 
famous quatrain in Sir Walter Scott, owes more to the 
man who quoted it than to its author. 

But, when we compare the pleasure in quotation 
from the great literature that his Greek contemporaries 
show, and the close familiarity that half-allusions betray, 
it must be felt that Paul is of another school. His 
quotations, his borrowed phrases and_half-phrases, 
echoes and assonances, point in very much the same 
way as theirs to an older literature; but with him it 
is the Septuagint. ‘Take a page of the Christian 
Clement of Alexandria, who wrote about a.p. 200— 
or, better, any twenty consecutive pages—and compare 
the same length of passage from Paul, and the contrast 
will confirm the view that Paul was not an enthusiast 
for Greek literature ; he did not love it as Clement did, 
and other men; he did not know it and live in it; 
his allegiance and his tradition were elsewhere. 

Paul practically says as much himself, when he tells 
the Corinthians that he did not come to them “ with 
excellency of speech or of wisdom,” that he brought 
no “‘ enticing words of man’s wisdom ” (1 Cor. il. 1, 4). 
When he says he was “rude (idiétes) in speech” 
(2 Cor. xi. 6), his meaning is quite plain. Elsewhere 
he speaks of the ididtes (1 Cor. xiv. 16, 23, 24) in 
exactly the sense which Greeks gave to the word—the 
“unlearned,” the “layman,” the “ outsider,” the 


1 In this connexion I tried an experiment upon a post-graduate 

class in an American University; how many knew the line— 
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever? 

Everybody knew it. How many knew the author? ‘There was a 
strong preponderance for Keats; but those who had read Endymion 
were a very small minority. 

The recent discovery and publication of some of Menander’s 
plays will probably not add to the number of those who regret that 
Paul did not know the poet at first hand. 


TARSUS 19 


“ordinary person.” It is, above all, the man who 
has not had the education, which was summed up in 
the name Rhetoric, but which included literature—a 
scheme of culture which was first thought out and 
practised by Isocrates at Athens, and from which, by 
a direct lineal succession, Oxford culture is descended. 
It is true that it was a commonplace for speakers to 
disclaim rhetorical skill. Socrates, in a clever passage 
of Plato’s dialogue Jon (§32 D), says to the rhapsode 
Ion—*‘ You rhapsodes and actors, and the poets whose 
verses you sing, are clever fellows, you know; but I 
can only tell you the plain truth, as an ordinary 
person (sdidtes) would.” But Paul was not playing 
with Socratic irony; it was obvious enough that his 
interests did not lie along the lines of ordinary Greek 
culture; he did not study their great poets, he did 
not practise their modes of speech. If students of 
Greek rhetoric recognize in his writings forms and 
turns of speech, some thirty figures in all, to which 
the experts gave technical names, it is more than likely 
that Paul could not have told the names. If a 
comparison with Jrisiram Shandy is tolerable in this 
connexion, the Fellows of Jesus College remarked with 
surprise upon the skill with which Walter Shandy used 
logical processes which he could not have labelled in 
scholastic language. Paul was not trained in Rhetoric, 
either in the narrower sense of the art of speaking or 
in the larger sense of Greek literary and philosophical 
culture. 

Here we touch a most interesting question, for a 
great many coincidences have been remarked between 
Paul and the Stoics,? some in language and some in 
ideas. ‘Thus Norden notices a “ Stoic doxology ” in 


1 A. T. Robertson, Grammar of Greek New Testament, p. 129. 

* They are discussed by Clemen, Primitive Christianity and Its 
Non-Fewish Elements, p. 366; Lightfoot, an appendix to Philippians ; 
W. Morgan, Religion and Theology of Paul, p. 28, etc.; Wendland 
and others. 


20 PAUL OF TARSUS 


the Romans, when Paul writes, “Of him and through 
him and to him are all things ” (Rom. xi. 36). “ Self- 
sufficient ”’ (autarkés, Phil. iv. 11) is a word with Stoic 
antecedents, a word embodying a great deal of essen- 
tial Stoic belief, but that is not to say that Paul 
uses it in any strict Stoic sense. Indeed, when he 
goes on to say that he “can do all things in him that 
strengtheneth me,” it is plain how little of the original 
doctrine survives in the Stoic word. It had clearly 
been popularized. ‘The contrast between soul and 
body (2 Cor. v. 1) is pronounced to be “ the clearest 
instance of his debt to Greek philosophy,” ! but here 
again Paul’s outlook is not that of the Stoics. If with 
them he traces sin to the guilty flesh,? he has not 
their faith in the soul’s ability to control the flesh and 
the passions of the body *—very far from it, as we 
see elsewhere (Rom. vii. 23). The Stoic emphasized 
“spirit? and contrasted physical and spiritual, as 
Paul does; but Paul’s account of “spirit” is not 
Stoic doctrine; behind his view is a personal God 
who bestows it, in their judgment it is a universal 
force in all nature ‘The “holy spirit ” of Seneca$ 
is quite another thing from the “‘ holy spirit ” of Paul. 
Paul’s emphasis on the irrelevance of sex or slavery in 
the things of Christ (Gal. ili. 28; Col. iil. 11) is not 
unlike the Stoic insistence on the same thing in 
thought ; perhaps the idea is borrowed or suggested, 
because, while it is not irrelevant to the real results 
of Christ’s incarnation, it is not clear that Paul draws 
all the necessary consequences from it. Paul may 
speak of “‘ reasonable, or logical, service ” (Rom. xii. 1), 
but he is not ready to carry logic to the lengths of the 
Stoic. ‘To find in his use of the allegoric method the 
influence of Stoicism is to ignore its wide employ- 
ment by people who were not Stoics, even if they 


1 Clemen, /.c. * Persius, 2,62. *% W. Morgan, /.c., pp. 16-19. 
« W. Morgan, /.c., pp. 28-29. 
* Seneca, Epistle, 41, 1, 2; sacer intra nos spiritus sedet. 


TARSUS 21 


did borrow it originally. The classification of sins, 
the comparison of man’s body to a temple (1 Cor. 
vi. 19; ili. 17), or to a vessel or a tent, the likening of 
society to a body—one cannot feel that it was absol- 
utely necessary for Paul to attend Stoic lectures to 
manage such matters. 

But as instances of possible suggestion, at any rate, 
as parallels, accumulate, it grows clear that, living in 
a world of popular lecturers, who travelled from place 
to place and gave demonstrations or displays of their 
accomplishments in philosophy, criticism, and style, 
Paul shared the inevitable atmosphere of his time, and 
caught something of the language and with it some- 
thing of the ideas. Stoic terms and Stoic ideas were 
not to be escaped by a man of intelligence living 
among men, and used to handling ideas, even if he 
did not himself frequent Stoic schools. It would 
have been difficult for him to find teachers who were 
not influenced by Greek ideas, even if he had wished 
to find them. He went in fact to Gamaliel, of whom 
it is recorded that above other Jewish teachers he was 
free from prejudice against Greek thought... The 
case is completed when we find some of the central 
ideas of Stoicism in what we may call the necessary 
and unconscious intellectual equipment of Paul. 

Thus to take an illuminative passage—* When the 
Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the 
things contained in the law, these, having not the law, 
are a law unto themselves: which show the work of 
law written in their hearts, their conscience also 
bearing them witness, and their thoughts the mean 
while accusing or else excusing one another ” (Rom. 
ll. 14, 15). ‘There are in this passage blended ele- 
ments— ‘The law” is pure Judaism; yet a Stoic, 
unacquainted with Judaism, might not have noticed 
anything very foreign in the term; nor would he 


1H. A. A. Kennedy, Paul and Last Things, p. 593; the tradition 
that Gamaliel was himself versed in Greek literature. 


22 PAUL OF TARSUS 


have recognized an undoubted echo of the language 
of Jeremiah (xxxi. 31 f.) in “ the law written in their 
hearts ” ; it would have seemed to him a not-out-of- 
the-way variant upon the two great Stoic conceptions, 
on which the sentence really turns—Nature and 
Conscience. Conscience was a Stoic word, of their 
own coining apparently—a word really needed by any 
who studied man’s mind, a tool of thought so obvious 
that it seems odd that it was not invented earlier. 
Nature was the very foundation of all Stoic phil- 
osophy; ‘to live according to Nature” was their 
most famous watchword. Paul here is using a con- 
ception which we do not find in the Old Testament. 
“Let Nature be your teacher”—if we may give a 
slightly different connotation to Wordsworth’s line— 
is it a Stoic or is it Paul speaking ? It is exactly with 
the Stoic apprehension of a common basis under all 
experience, of a common law written from the begin- 
ning in every man’s mind, in his whole composition, 
that Paul speaks. Sometimes he is not so successful 
in catching the Stoic tone; the question about Nature 
teaching a man not to have long hair (1 Cor. xi. 14) 
they would certainly have answered differently and 
contradicted him. But he was probably hardly aware 
how close he was coming at any time to the language 
of the school, and he was almost certainly indifferent. 

But to sum up his relations with Stoicism. ‘The 
School coined the language; the roving lecturers 
and the audiences that quoted them gave it currency ; 
it came to Paul. He slid, as we also do, into using the 
speech of our day, where it coincides with what we 
observe to be true.1. The Stoics and their followers 
pointed to a great correspondence between what we 
may call, in antithesis, Nature and human nature; 

1 Cf. K. Lake, Lenzdmarks of Early Christianity, p. 89, who says 
that attempts made to trace the direct influence of Stoic metaphysics 
in Paul only show that “ their vocabulary was more widely used than 


their problems were understood—a phenomenon not peculiar te 
the first century.” 


TARSUS 23 


they are made for one another; there are laws of 
Nature, and these are also the laws of human nature. 
Conscience is that operation of the human mind, that 
function, aspect or part of it, by which we become 
aware of these laws. Nature and Conscience work 
together, just as Paul says. If it was a nominally 
heathen Greek who pointed it out, a good Jew can 
verify it in the real world which the true God made, 
and can find (as our passage shows) a hint in Jeremiah 
that the true God intended the link between Man 
and all Nature—the union, the community, of all 
God’s works—to be discovered. If Paul, as we should 
suppose, absorbed these ideas from current phrase and 
the common stock of axiomatic ideas, we deduce not 
a Stoic school or a Stoic teacher, but a cosmopolitan 
world in which ideas are no longer private or racial 
property—a world conscious through the terms it 
shares of a common experience and an interest in 
every man’s experience of God. And from other 
sources we know that this was the milieu in which a 
cosmopolitan Jew of Paul’s day must move, whatever 
his powers of resistance or assimilation. 

Paul, then, is not a man regularly trained in Greek 
culture; he is, as he avows, not a product of the 
schools ; nor is he a philosopher, if philosophers pure 
and simple at all survived and philosophy were not 
merged in ethics and psychology. His traditions are 
those of orthodox Judaism; he conceived himself to 
be an orthodox Jew. But an open mind in such a 
world receives impressions from many sources, and he 
could not use Greek speech unreflectively. It was 
bound to tell upon him and it did. He met the 
Greek spirit in Tarsus, city of athletes, rhetoricians 
and Stoics, and the very fact that his Scriptures were 
in Greek secured the influence of that spirit; he was 
to be a man of all the world. But meanwhile he was 
a young Jew and orthodox. 

1 See further on this, Chap. VI. 


Cuapter II 
JERUSALEM 


Pau was a young Jew and orthodox, but he was bred 
in a Greek world, and was more open than he would 
have guessed to influences outside the pale. For such 
trouble waits. 

The circumstances of his going to Jerusalem he 
does not mention, and our data are scanty but not 
altogether insufficient. He tells us himself, in his 
letters, that he was ‘‘ as touching the law a Pharisee”’ 
(Phil. 11. 5) ; “‘ I forged ahead in Judaism beyond many 
of my own age and race, and I was more exceedingly 
zealous for the traditions of my fathers”? (Gal. 1. 14). 
We may recall in passing the comments of Jesus on 
the ‘ traditions”? and on the enthusiasm with which 
they were upheld. Luke further tells us how Paul 
divided the hostile council in Jerusalem by announcing 
that he was “‘ a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee ”’ (Acts 
xxiii. 6), and how he readily explained his upbringing 
to King Agrippa and suggested that there must be 
plenty of evidence about it, if any one cared to pro- 
duce it. “ My manner of life from my youth, from 
its beginning among my own race in Jerusalem, all 
the Jews know. ‘They knew me earlier, too [the 
Greek is not free from some vagueness], if they were 
only willing to testify that, according to the most 
exact sect of our religion, I lived a Pharisee” (Acts 
Xxvl. 4, 5). Paul, again, in his open-air speech at 
Jerusalem told the people that he was brought up at 
the feet of Gamaliel (Acts xxii. 3). The next step 
comes in Luke’s direct narrative; Paul was a party to 
the movement of persecution. From this small hand- 

24 


JERUSALEM 25 


ful of facts we have to reconstruct his years at Jeru- 
salem, or leave it alone—unless from the grown man 
and his mind we can recapture the youth, not always 

a quite impossible feat, especially where the man is 
remarkable for keeping through life characteristics 
which every one agrees to be youthful. 

Let us anticipate, and look at the grown Paul— 
Paul in middle life, “‘ Paul the aged ”—impetuous and 
energetic to the last ; and impetuous energy is surely 
to be read in the proceedings of the persecutor. He 
is large-built, fresh of mind and strongly individual, 
unmistakable for any one else. If the persecutor 
does not manifest the width of intellectual range and 
sympathy, which the apostle shows ever to be increas- 
ing in the most surprising way, we can believe that 
impulses and associations of the ‘T'arsian boyhood were 
being suppressed by the logical fury of youth, and that 
the chaos and frenzy of his mind were intensified by 
this struggle against instinct. ‘Iwo strains battle in 
him, reason and intuition; we know him as a dialec- 
tician and the possessor of intuitive gifts in the same 
epistle, now one and now the other—sometimes in 
the same chapter. ‘There is a great deal of both in 
chapters 11. to iv. of the Epistle to the Romans; yet, 
in spite of all the great thoughts and phrases of the 
fifth chapter, most people will oftener read the eighth, 
where his intuition is gloriously free from his schol- 
asticism. He is bound to think a thing out, to hammer 
it out with reason and fact, and his sense of fact is the 
thing that saves him and confuses his critics. ‘The 
tangents + that haunt his writings in later years show 
the sudden swiftness with which he pounces on a 
new idea or truth. His blaze of anger at Antioch, 
when he found his colleagues were not (what he calls) 

“running straight ” (dpQomodove1, Gal. ii. 14); his 
indignant protest: ‘‘ Before God I lie not” (Gal. i. 20) 
—no common or frequent phrase with him—these 

1 Cf. pp. 189, 190. 


26 PAUL OF TARSUS 


bear witness to a nature passionate in devotion to truth. 
We may note also how, without his quoting himself, 
as didactic persons do, he uses in an early letter and 
in a later the same searching Greek verb '—not the 
language of the easy-going— prove all things” 
(1 Thess. v. 21) and “prove the better things” 
(Phil. i. 10, Soxycdfew). From his first appearance 
as a Christian he argues—arguing, proving, and con- 
founding people at Damascus (Acts ix. 22); just as, 
years later, we find him doing at ‘Thessalonica, Beroea, 
Corinth, Ephesus, and getting regularly into trouble 
with it, as human storm-centres do. Logic, love of 
truth, argument, courage and intuition, with extreme 
swiftness of mind and a quick temper—a man of 
passion and of reason, every college knows the type, 
born, like the ancient Athenians, “neither to keep 
quiet themselves, nor to leave other people quiet.” ? 
Those who do not know college life may read of it 
in Wordsworth’s Prelude and many other places. 
Perhaps we shall not be far astray, if we picture Paul, 
launched upon a new course of study, a new way of 
life, to have been not so very unlike the young 
Wordsworth at St John’s, both in mind and in mood 
—and the first mood was in neither case the last. 


My spirit was up, my thoughts were full of hope;... 
Questions, directions, warnings and advice 

Flowed in upon me from all sides ; fresh day 

Of pride and pleasure! ... 

I was the Dreamer, they the Dream ; I roamed 
Delighted through the motley spectacle ; 

Gowns grave, or gaudy, doctors, students, streets, 
Courts, cloisters, flocks of churches, gateways, towers.® 


Paul was indeed not “ a stripling of the hills, a northern 
villager,” and we do not know at what age precisely 


t It is significant how characteristic words recur with him. Cf. 
p- 195, 2123 and also cf. Gal. il. 20; Eph. v. 2, 25. 
2 Thucydides, i. 70, 9. 8 Wordsworth, Prelude, iil. 18-35 


JERUSALEM 27 


he removed to Jerusalem. Paul is the most auto- 
biographical of writers, and the least. Every sentence 
is Paul, rather than Pauline, but chronology and 
quotation are work too slow for such a spirit.} 

So far we have thought of Paul going to sit at the 
feet of Gamaliel very much as of a man going up for 
the first time to the University. But Jerusalem was 
a great deal more. It was the ancient capital of the 
Jewishpeople, written all over with history. We 
have but to recall afew names from the Old Testament 
_to see again the city to which Paul went. ‘The 
' Jebusites, David, Solomon, Isaiah and Sennacherib, 
_ Nebuchadnezzar, Jeremiah, Nehemiah, what a story 
they make! And Antiochus Epiphanes, Pompey and 
Herod (for we had better leave out Alexander the 
Great) open up fresh avenues of memory, great records 
of national suffering and deliverance, and of suffering 
again. ‘The Book of Deuteronomy had given the 
place another value altogether than the historical ; 
here was the one place where sacrifice might be offered 
to Jehovah, a place, where, if theory were true, earth 
came closer to heaven than anywhere else. It was a 
pilgrim centre, as it is still. In Deuteronomy and 
the Psalms we can read of what it was hoped the 
pilgrim centre would be— 


I to the hills will lift mine eyes— 
Thy Saints take pleasure in her stones, 
Her very dust to them is dear. 


In the Gospels and the Acts, and in the letters of 
St Jerome,? we can read what it became. “ If,” 


1 Cf, the tangles of chronology in which Paul and Luke between 
them, with Galatians and Acts, involve the reader; and, e.g., the 
difficulty of guessing how much of Gal. ii. Paul means to tell us he 
really said at Antioch. Some four places will be found in the early 
part of that Epistle where sentences break off and take new starts. 
It may be Paul’s explosive writing that is the cause, or the despair of 
a sorely tried amanuensis. ~ 

2 I may be allowed to add Stephen Graham’s fascinating book, 
With the Russian Pilgrims to Ferusalem. 


28 PAUL OF TARSUS 


wrote St Jerome about a.p. 394, “‘ the sites of the Cross 
and the Resurrection were not in a crowded city, 
where are a curia, a garrison, harlots, actors, jesters 
and everything there is in any other city; or if its 
only crowds were monks, then indeed it would be a 
desirable abode for all monks.” 3 Josephus ? affirms 
that under Cestius Gallus (a.p. 63-66) a census was 
taken of the pilgrims who came to the Jewish city 
and that the number was 2,700,200—a figure which 
“the Jew Apella may believe,” as Horace profanely 
says. It is too like the army of Xerxes; but, like the 
numbers alleged of that army, it is an indication of 
the swarms of Jews who came to Jerusalem, and a 
story in the early part of the Acts (41. 9-11) indicates 
that they were almost as miscellaneous as the hosts 
that Xerxes led to Greece. Other sources suggest the 
disorders and factions of the town, which we can 
readily believe. Pilate on one occasion mingled the 
blood of Galilaeans with their sacrifices (Luke xiii. 1). 
To Jesus the place, with its temple full of hucksters 
trading in birds and cattle and making money out of 
the pilgrims in its sacred courts, and with the floating 
population of rufhans that a sanctuary drew, was “‘a 
den of thieves ”? (Mark x1. 17). 

From the squalor of the present, people in such 
places, who are not engaged in exploiting the tourist 
and the pilgrim, take refuge in the past, in archaeology. 
But Paul was the last man capable of becoming an 
antiquary, however acute and keen his sense of the 
value of history, however intense his attachment to 
his people and its spiritual story. If Mr C. G. 
Montefiore finds Paul’s religion before his conversion 
insufficiently joyous and darkened by too sombre a 
strain of pessimism, the contrast between the idealized 
Holy City and the actual pilgrim centre may have 

1 Jerome, Epp., lviii. 4. I may refer to the chapter on “ Women 


Pilgrims” in Life and Letters in the Fourth Century. 
? Josephus, Be//. Fud., vi. 9,2: G.A. Smith, Ferusalem, ii. 397. 


JERUSALEM 29 


contributed to the darkening of life. At the same 
time, we may suppose that a Cilician-born Jew, with 
interests keen enough in the living and larger world 
he knew (in spite of the intense nationalism, which 
at this time he was clearly trying to heighten), would 
in moments of nature find fresh avenues back to the 
larger world in the great tides of humanity that swept 
in from everywhere, Jews, proselytes and outsiders. 
Perhaps, too, a man who was a Roman citizen by birth 
and (at least in later life) by instinct, may have found 
the anti-Roman feeling of the home-bred Jews some- 
thing parochial. In all this attempt to recapture his 
years in Jerusalem, we are, as already said, dependent 
on guess-work ; but where we have a man of marked 
characteristics, guess-work need hardly be as random 
as its name sometimes suggests. At any rate we find 
the future Apostle of the Gentiles living in a focus of 
the world’s life, provincial town as it was. He could 
hardly have been reminded more forcibly in Rome 
itself, or Alexandria, of the many sorts and conditions 
of men; and this was one of his problems. 

His studies in Judaism did not need to be intensive 
to reveal to him how the religion was divided into 
schools and sects. ‘The thing was patent. The long 
history of Jewish thought was marked and shaped by 
the struggles of thinkers, as everybody knew. The 
prophets were famous for their defiance of popular 
misconceptions of God and of the ritual He wished. 
The careers of Nehemiah and Ezra had been full 
of controversy. Judaism was still divided. All Jews 
accepted the Pentateuch, all the Temple; and the 
canon of the Old Testament was winning its way to 
acceptance. All these things held Jews together ; 
but in interpretation and observance they disagreed. 
Paul was the son of a Pharisee, strict by tradition, 
ardent by temperament, clear from beginning to end 
that Sadduceeism was in essence a negation of God, 
as indeed it was; and, except by antipathy, there is 


30 PAUL OF TARSUS 


little reason to suppose that the views of the Sadducees 
influenced him. ‘The elements that shaped him in 
Judaism were the noble ones. That he was brought 
up on the Old Testament and some books of the 
Apocrypha (notably The Wisdom of Solomon) we 
have already seen. Even after his conversion, he 
went to the Temple to pray, and received there, 
we learn, a significant addition to the many calls 
that took him to the Gentile world (Acts xxii. 17-21). 
More strange is it that at the end of his journeys, 
on his last visit to Jerusalem, he could fall in with 
the compromise in practice (as it must _ before 
long have seemed to Christians) proposed to him 
by the friends at headquarters. ‘Two other con- 
tributory factors have to be considered in more 
detail—the influence of Apocalyptic ideas, and the 
reaction of Greek thought as it affected the Jews 
of the Dispersion. ‘To these we must return in a 
little. 

He was a Pharisee, but not all Pharisees were of 
one mind. ‘There was a common outlook, a common 
conviction of the supremacy of God and of His law, 
a common purpose to observe that law to the last jot 
and tittle, and to safeguard the observance by keeping 
within the hedges set up by tradition. A determined 
attempt is made nowadays by Jews and others to 
vindicate the Pharisees from the character which the 
Gospels give them; but it will take a great deal of 
proof to show that Jesus did not find himself in con- 
flict with them, and that the grounds of his disagree- 
ment were not substantially those given in our narra- 
tives. ‘There were obviously’ Pharisees who entirely 
deceived themselves—“ blind Pharisees,” as Jesus calls 
them—who combined, as is very easy to do, excessive 
scrupulosity about trifles with insufficient attention to 
the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy 
and faith (Matt. xxiii. 23). That there were others 
who were keener in self-criticism is shown by the 


JERUSALEM 31 


fact that Paul came of the school, and admits it readily 
in later life, admits it without a hint that his Pharisa- 
ism had been hypocrisy, or that it was anything but 
an experiment in religion which utterly failed—a right 
enough thing to try, but a wrong thing to go on with, 
when Christ was available. Among Pharisees there 
were different schools of interpretation ; the followers 
of Hillel and Shammai, it was said, not Elijah himself 
could reconcile. Paul, as a Greek-speaking Jew of the 
Dispersion, went, as already said, to Gamaliel.1 To 
Bae inquiry into the Jewish sects is not our purpose, 
ut to understand Paul. 

The elements that go to his training are, in the 
case of every man of any real force, controlled by 
reflexion upon experience, his own experience and 
that of others so far as it is available for him; for his 
observation is part of his experience, though not the 
dominant part. ‘The training is experience; but 
what schools and colleges and teachers contribute is 
far from being the whole experience; and the man 
reflecting upon what he has seen and what he has 
been is larger than all his experience together. Hence 
while the elements in his environment and upbringing 
that shape him count, the man himself counts much 
more. What does he make of father and mother, 
school and college and professor? Does he re-affirm 
what he has been taught? ‘The presumption is that 
he does so on the basis of its observed correspondence 
with fact. The question, then, of his native stamp 
and endowment is at least as important as that of his 
teachers or of the atmosphere in which he grows— 
more important. 


Paul kept to the end a good deal of his Judaism,— 


1 Mr Montefiore, Fudaism and Paul, p. 90, prefers, for reasons 
which I do not guess, to doubt the statement in Acts that Paul was a 
pupil of Gamaliel; I do not know whether Luke or Paul is to be 
supposed to have lied or blundered over it. Professor Kirsopp Lake 
accepts the statement; Larlier Epistles of St Paul, p. 427. 


32 PAUL OF TARSUS 


some of it because he believed in it after long and 
concentrated thought; some of it, as with the Greek 
ideas which he picked up in the Hellenistic atmosphere, 
with a certain serene unconsciousness that it too 
needed criticism. Outstanding examples, obvious at 
a glance, are such famous pieces of exegesis as that 
about seed and seeds in the Epistle to the Galatians— 
‘He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of 
one, And to thy seed, which is Christ ”’ (Gal. iii. 16) ; 
or the spiritualization of Israel’s experiences in the 
exodus—* They were all baptized unto Moses in the 
cloud and in the sea ; and did all eat the same spiritual 
meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink ; 
for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed 
them, and that Rock was Christ” (1 Cor. x. 2-4). 
Such ingenuities of interpretation pleased the Jews, 
and, unfortunately, later on pleased the Christians, 
who learnt the method from Philo. It is true, how- 
ever, that if Philo had not been there to teach them, 
the Stoics were doing, and the Neo-Platonists rather 
later were to do, the same thing with Homer. Still 
Paul did not learn it from Stoics or Neo-Platonists; he 
got it from his Jewish teachers. 

It is to be remarked at once that, while, probably, 
doubts as to the validity of the method hardly crossed 
his mind, it is only occasionally that he uses it, and 
rarely to establish any point of first importance. 
When he comes to what is fundamental, he turns 
(probably) unconsciously but by instinct to his own 
experience. 

More than these small ingenuities came from his 
school. He is never stirred by the question that has 
agitated modern Christendom, as it did Marcion in 
the second century—the question of the authority 
and inspiration of the Old Testament. He may not, 
in any passage to be ascribed with certainty to his pen,? 


12 Tim. ill. 16 is a famous verse in a much-disputed epistle, some 
parts of which, I feel, must be genuine Paul. It is possible that 


JERUSALEM 33 


suggest any account of inspiration, but the author- 
ity of the Old Testament was a Jewish axiom, 
and it is among Paul’s axioms, unchallenged, almost 
un-thought-about. ‘There the Old Testament stood ; 
the prophets had been conscious that the Lord spoke 
to them, and they had said so; and history had again 
and again confirmed them. As for the Law, one 
question and its answer will suffice. ‘‘ What advan- 
tage then hath the Jew, or what profit is there of 
circumcision? Much every way; chiefly because 
that unto them were committed the oracles of God ” 
(Rom. iii. 1). The Jew had indeed from of old the 
oracles of God and the law of God; and Paul had 
no question in his mind as to the truth, the validity 
and the permanence of the Law; he was a thorough 
Jew here, and accepted without criticism. Without 
criticism, but not without interpretation. If God 
eventually spoke to him in a way quite beyond mistake, 
and if then there appeared divergency between God’s 
word as given to Paul and God’s word as recorded in 
the canon, the conflict was not fatal; it merely meant 
fresh thought, and new examination of the old records. 
If the schools of the Jews have their differences of 
interpretation, where two explanations are lawful, to 
propound a third can hardly be sin—especially if the 
third rendering is confirmed by revelation. Allegory 
and the non-critical handling of passages and phrases 
out of their context were the accepted and traditional 
lines of commentary. Paul could as legitimately use 
them as any other student—perhaps more so, if by 
such procedure he could avoid a narrow interpreta- 
tion of God’s mind and rulings, if he could reconcile 
apparent contradictions and justify the ways of God 
to men. ‘The unsoundness of the scholarship saved 


Paul would have endorsed the rendering of it in the Authorized 
Version, but it is not the only possible rendering. A disputable 
translation of a doubtful passage is a slender foundation for a 
dogma. 


Cc 


34 PAUL OF TARSUS 


him from slavery to a book and a code, and left him 
free for fresh experience of God. 

For this is the supreme contribution of Judaism to 
Paul and to the world. Polytheism and pantheism 
were the twin curses of contemporary religion, the 
one often immoral and always trifling, the other 
vague and disheartening as it always will be. The 
Jew at all events had no doubts at all about the reality 
of God, His eternity, His universal rule and His 
absolute power. ‘This made for sanity and for real 
thought; the paradox of a reflective Greek that the 
Jews might be called “a nation of philosophers ” hit 
the mark. Philosophers had always been units; even 
their schools showed tendencies to disruption; the 
Jewish people stood together in a faith, at once the 
outcome of intense experience and long thought and 
the promise of clearer and ampler thought. The 
Jew might say it was the gift of revelation ; well, let 
him say so for popular audiences; the philosophic 
value of his belief was just as great. It meant the 
unity of the universe and of experience, and eventu- 
ally a thought-out world, logically based on principle. 
But that was not the language of the Jews. No. 
‘God spake all these words, saying”? (Exod. xx. 1). 
The Greek might always prefer,to put things in the 
abstract, and certainly there were Jews who found 
his term Logos extraordinarily useful; but the centre 
of Judaism was not a philosophy, nor the unity of the 
universe, but God, personal, final, and supreme, 
Maker of heaven and earth and of man, Lawgiver and 
Judge. God was also the Father of Israel, in some 
degree of Israelites also, and, in a manner of speaking, 
of other men; at all events He was Maker and Judge 
of all men. Morality, the bounds of right and wrong, 
were fixed by His decree; and once that was appre- 
hended, there was no more to be said. To speak 
once more in the other tongue, when you have reached 
the ultimate, there can be no more to be said. Inthe 


JERUSALEM 35 
Torah, the Law,! God had revealed His will, and 


change was impossible. ‘The only loophole was inter- 
pretation,? and in view of everything involved inter- 
pretation was a serious task; the issues were awful, 
to mistake or to change what was written might lead 
to disaster beyond thought. Severity toward those 
who interpret otherwise than you do becomes on this 
basis intelligible. 

‘Paul’s Pharisaism then is the logical outcome of 
his conviction of the One God. If God’s law is all- 
important, nothing can matter more than to be sure 
that one is really keeping it; the straitest sect will 
be the wisest one, the only wise one. Mr Montefiore 
tries to prove that, though Paul “ could fancy himself 
perfectly orthodox ”’ and a good Pharisee, his religion 
differed in “‘ those very points which constitute the 
essence and bloom of a religion,” viz. outlook and 
emotion. He maintains that there was a_ broad 
difference between Paul and the “ Rabbinic Jew,” 
whom he reconstructs from the Rabbinic literature 
of a rather later day. ‘The orthodox Jew, whom he 
describes, believed in the same One God, but reckoned 
that the Jew stood in a peculiar relation to Him. 
“¢ The average and decent-living Israelite would inherit 
the world to come, would be ‘saved’ to use other 
and more familiar phraseology,” but not exactly on 
his own merits; ‘‘ God’s love for Israel, His love of 

1R. Travers Herford, The Pharisees, p. 54, says “there were 
reasons, no doubt, why the LXX always rendered Torah by vépos 
as there were reasons why Paul, who ought to have known better, 
perpetuated the same mischievous error.” Such purism is hard to 
understand; whatever Torah and vopos first meant, two hundred 
years of equation is not irrelevant in the history of words; and much 
of Mr Herford’s book goes far to acquit Paul. 

# On interpretation, see R. T. Herford, Te Pharisees, pp. 67, 
69; 166 note. 

8 Mr Montefiore in a later book, The Old Testament and After 
(1923), pp. 466 ff., deals with my treatment of his picture of the 
God of the Rabbinic Jew. He corrects my inferences in my Progress 
in Religion, but most gracefully suggests that he had written unclearly. 


36 PAUL OF TARSUS 


the repentant sinner, His inveterate tendency to 
forgiveness, together with the merits of the patriarchs 
[cf. Luke iii. 8] would amply make up for their own 
individual deficiencies.” ‘‘ Salvation was the privilege 
of every Israelite, who, believing in God and in His 
Law, tried to do his best and was sorry for his failures 
and lapses.” | ““ Yes, God’). .'). Sis very angingy iaas 
“let a man repent but a very little and God will 
forgive very much.” He holds that Paul’s was an 
altogether inferior and inadequate type of Judaism, 
“ poorer, colder, less satisfying and more pessimistic,” 
gloomy about the fate of the Gentile world, gloomy 
about the possibility of overcoming evil inclination, 
gloomy with the sense of human frailty—in all, a 
“‘ cheap and poor Hellenistic Judaism.” } 

Mr Montefiore asks eight questions about Paul, 
which, put in a somewhat condensed form, are these: 
If Paul had known and accepted the Rabbinic view 
of the world, would he have been so pessimistic ? 
If he had known and accepted the Rabbinic views of 
the Law, of piety toward God, of religious psychology, 
of salvation, could he have evolved the doctrines of 
the Law, piety, psychology, and mysticism to be 
found in his epistles? How could he have ignored 
the Rabbinic teaching of repentance ? (Mr Montefiore 
does not think that to the Rabbinic Jew sin was less 
hateful than it was to Paul.*) If Paul had believed 
in the markedly human view of the Messiah held by 
the Rabbinic Jew, would he or could he have evolved 
his Christology ? If he had held with the Rabbinic 
School their ‘ready and not unwilling consignment 
of the non-believer and non-Jew to perdition ” (com- 
patible he holds with ‘‘ the most exquisite and delicate 
charity ’’ “), where would his special mission have been ? 


1C. G. Montefiore, Fudaism and Paul, pp. 93, 35, 36, 42, 94» 
53. 4 1b. p. 5$9- 
8 Jb.p.77. Cf. The Old Testament and After, p. 467. 
“Jd. p. 56; modified in The Old Testament and After, p. 468. 


JERUSALEM 


The main questions here concern Sin and Conscience 
—the Gentile world—and the Messiah. 

We may, I| think, take the picture of the Rabbinic 
Jew as Mr Montefiore draws him, particularly since 
he does it in a spirit of admiration and indeed (unless 
I am mistaken) of advocacy. Mr Montefiore counts 
the religious outlook which he describes satisfactory 
and happy, so that we need hardly suppose that he is 
undervaluing the Rabbinic Jew. He admits that his 
evidence comes from the fourth and fifth centuries, 
and other scholars suggest the use of extreme caution 
in applying evidence of that date to the period of 
Paul.1 But suppose we provisionally concede his 
historical conclusion, and find Paul in a milieu such 
as he suggests, it is at once clear that the contrast 
between Paul and the type of mind, which Mr 
Montefiore sketches, is very great—as great as he 
insists, or greater. But it does not, I think, necessarily 
follow that Paul, if more sombre, more pessimistic 
and so forth, is really on a lower plane of thought and 
insight. The so-called “ healthy-minded” are some- 
times shallow. Cassandra, historically, has often been 
right and the optimists wrong. 

To the Rabbinic Jew, Mr Montefiore thinks, sin 
was not less hateful than to Paul. It is quite clear, 
on Mr Montefiore’s showing, that the Rabbinic Jew 
was far less troubled about sin, assumed far more 
easily that his repentance was adequate, and believed 
with no great effort of mind that his God took the 
same rather superficial view of sin that he did himself.? 
It would not be unfair to quote Heine’s famous 
remark: ‘“‘ God will forgive me; c'est son métier” 
—a sentiment much less smug and by its wit eluding 


1H. A. A. Kennedy, Paul and Last Things, p. 217. Kirsopp 
Lake, Earlier Epistles, p. 426. 

2 See Mr Montefiore’s rejoinder, The Old Testament and After, 
p- 467; fundamentally I believe I am right in my inferences from the 
earlier statements, which the later qualify but do not cancel. 


38 PAUL OF TARSUS 


the question as to how deeply the poet had thought 
out the problem. Heine may be right, and the 
Rabbinic Jew may be right; we have to face that pos- 
sibility, distant as it seems. But if they are right, then 
those who have thought most deeply upon religion in 
Greece, in Christendom, in Hinduism and Buddhism, 
have been lamentably astray. ‘To set up such a view 
of sin, as Mr Montefiore attributes, perhaps correctly, 
to the Rabbinic Jew, as truer, saner and more profound 
than another judgment, which has the support of 
Plato, is to risk the charge of a certain superficiality. 
Paul and Plato, however their language may differ, 
have very much the same conception of sin. ‘They 
reached it, no doubt, by rather different paths,—Plato 
through insistence on the intellectual and moral 
necessity of a righteous universe, Paul through acute 
realization of the holiness of God. If Paul and Plato 
are wrong, and the Rabbinic Jew right, that Jew has 
transcended his spiritual ancestors. For prophet and 
psalmist are with Paul in their conviction of sin and 
their knowledge of the misery of it, and they reached 
this outlook as he did. ‘I saw the Lord sitting upon 
a throne, high and lifted up,” says Isaiah (vi. 1); and 
the immediate result of the sight was a humiliating 
sense of his own pollution and that of his people, a 
sense of his need of cleansing. ‘Throughout life Paul’s 
problem, and Paul’s conviction, is the Righteousness 
of God. It is his axiom in every argument, his 
problem when he thinks of the Gentile world and of 
human depravity, his despair when he looks into his 
own life. 

It is not necessary to read far or deeply into such a 
document as the Epistle to the Romans to see how 
impressed he is—and appears always to have been— 
with the seriousness of sin. Fools, the old Hebrew had 
said, make a mock of sin (Prov. xiv. 9); Paul stands 
with the world’s great thinkers, aghast at the power of 
sin and its consequences. ‘There are those who do 


JERUSALEM 39 


not read autobiography in the seventh chapter of 
Romans—as if Paul used the first person singular here 
in the style practised by rhetoricians of the second 
order—as if such writing could be anything but 
autobiography! “The Law is spiritual; but I am 
carnal, sold under sin ’—the words are for many too 
familiar to yield all their significance without pressure 
(rerpapeévos vrd THY apapriav). He is the slave 
of sin, or has been, without power to do even the good 
he would have wished to do, a victim of its paralysis. 
* What I hate, that do I.” “I know that in me 
(that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing; for to 
will is present with me; but to perform that which is 
good I find not . . . I find a law that, when I would 
do good, evil is present with me. . . . I see another 
law in my members, warring against the law of my 
mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of 
sin which is in my members. O wretched man that 
I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this 
death?” ‘The passage is not isolated, or the ac- 
cidental record of a mood; it records an experience 
which Paul, and not he alone, has found central; it 
is too personal and too real to be anything but of the 
essential fabric of all his thought. The old Hebrew 
sense of God, intensified by generations of prayer and 
insight and self-criticism—and this time re- appearing 
in a man of supreme genius—no wonder conscience is 
one of the keynotes of his life. 

At every point in the story of Paul’s thought, the 
question of Sin and Conscience recurs. No treatment 
of his life and mind can be valid, in which the presence 
and consciousness of his experience in the service of 
conscience, and of his experience of the power of sin, 
are not recognized as primary factors in his Theology 
and primary motives in his conduct. Whether we 
agree with his view of Sin, is not the issue ; nor whether 
we place him below or above the Rabbinic Jew or the 
modern person who claims to be “ healthy-minded.” 


40 PAUL OF TARSUS 


For Paul the long struggle to be righteous before God, 
and his sense of failure in that struggle, are part of 
every judgment he makes upon God, or upon human 
life, present or future. He is a man who has failed, 
who has sinned, and who has been forgiven, and who 
can never outgrow the wonder of his forgiveness. 
To this we shall have to return again and again; for 
the present we have to note that in these early days 
in Jerusalem he is accumulating the experience that 
made his life and is beginning to try to make clear to 
his own mind what it means. 

When we reach questions of the Gentile world and 
of the Messiah, we touch issues which were practically 
closed for the Rabbinic Jew of the fourth century, 
which were perhaps not of supreme interest to his 
precursor, the Jew of the same type of mind (waiving 
the discussion of opinions) in the first centuries B.c. 
and a.p. ‘The later Rabbinic Jew, in Mr Montefiore’s 
explicit words, made a “ready and not unwilling 
consignment”? of the Gentiles to perdition'; his 
Messiah, whenever he might come, and his coming 
was relegated to a distant and indefinite future, 
would be human and no more; and he had ceased to 
try to relieve doubts, perhaps by now suppressed or 
banished, as an early Judaism had done, by the com- 
position of Apocalyptic books. Paul lived in a period 
when the Gentile was acutely interesting. ‘The Apoc- 
alyptic movement had grown out of the pressure of 
the Gentile, so that we may not improperly consider 
them together. 

The Apocalyptic literature that survives is extra- 
ordinarily tiresome to readers who have been trained 
upon Greek art and thought. ‘The writers of it are 
dull and tasteless as a rule, with little gift of expres- 
sion and next to none at all of clearness. ‘They are, 
however, receiving a good deal of attention to-day, 
‘perhaps, as often happens after a period of neglect, 

1 Montefiore, Fudaism and Paul, p. 56. 


JERUSALEM 4l 


rather more than they deserve—in some quarters, a 
great deal more. Except that the book of Daniel is 
in the canon, one would say broadly that the whole 
movement shows influences unfamiliar to the Old 
Testament. ‘The writers are pre-occupied with his- 
tory in a way strange to the prophets, though the 
prophets were far from indifferent to history; and 
they have a dimmer and fainter vision of God. ‘To 
the prophet God was flamingly real; to the writers 
of the Apocalypses, while they believed in Him and 
while their object was to justify His ways to men, 
God is rather remote and His character so far beyond 
criticism as to be scarcely susceptible of being even 
ethical; His sovereignty outweighs questions of right 
and wrong. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
right (Gen. xviii. 25)? He can obviously do what 
He likes ; and what His people would like, He will do. 
For the prophet, it was imperative that Israel should 
take the point of view of Jehovah; and he was ready 
with amazing courage to denounce Israel’s failure to 
do so. The Apocalyptist conceived of God as more 
like an ordinary Jew, not altogether unlike the Jew 
of Juvenal apt 


Non monstrare vias eadem nist sacra colentt, 
Quaesitum ad fontem solos deducere verpos (xiv. 103), 


and possessed of all that Jew’s “‘ contempt for Roman 
laws.” Here is what one of them says, and his words 
justify Mr Montefiore’s “ready and not unwilling 
consignment ”’ :— 


“Then thou, O Israel, wilt be happy, and thou 
wilt mount upon the neck of the eagle and [the days 
of thy mourning] will be ended. 

“ And God will exalt thee, and He will cause thee 
to approach to the heaven of the stars, and He will 
establish thy habitation among men. 

“And thou wilt look from on high, and wilt see 


42 PAUL OF TARSUS 


thine enemies in Ge[henna], and thou wilt recognize 
them and rejoice, and wilt give thanks and confess 
thy, Creator ys 

Minds less vindictive did not pronounce so bluntly 
on Gentile destiny, but avowed that they could not 
solve the problem of what God should do with the 
Gentiles? There was no blessed resurrection for 
them, at least, if the Jews of the first century B.c. 
and the first century A.D. were right.? 

If it is conjecture that Paul had upon his mind 
before his conversion the problem of the Gentile 
world, it is perhaps legitimate conjecture; it is at 
least putting two and two together. We know that 
he grew up in a Gentile environment ; we know that 
he did not miss its interests, even if in education he 
was directed to Jewish rather than to Greek ideals ; 
we know that, at any rate in retrospect, he associated 
his conversion with the call to preach Christ to the 
Gentiles.* 

With Peter (for instance), on the other hand, the 
evangelization of the world was not at all an imme- 
diate corollary from the knowledge of Christ. Mr 
Montefiore concedes that any occasional qualm which 
Jews might have about the darkness of the heathen 
world would probably be oftener in Hellenistic com- 
munities. It is clear, too, that there were Jewish 
thinkers who had already transcended the tribal view 
of God to which Rabbinic Judaism returned in spirit ; 
they wrote of a general resurrection,® of a general last 
judgment, of immortality. The problem was a com- 
plicated one. If a man accepted the narrower view 


1 The Assumption of Moses, x. 8-10 (Charles), a document perhaps 
written in the lifetime of Paul. 

2 See the discussion in 4 Ezra villi; pp. 239, 240 below. 

$’R. H. Charles, Ezoch, pp. 297, 300. 

Acts Xx. tk Gi xxvi, a7 c) Galatia oe 

5 Montefiore, Fudaism and St Paul, p. 110. 

¢4 Ezra vii, 26-44. Cf. Fairweather, Background of the Gospels, 


pp. 276-291. 


JERUSALEM 43 


of a Davidic King, an Anointed, who should rescue 
Israel from their oppressors, then the question of 
Gentile destiny in God’s scheme of things was not 
very important ; it might be forgotten. Even if the 
Messiah were a being pre-existent, at God’s right hand, 
a Supernatural Son of Man, the matter might still 
be shelved somehow, if one concentrated on Israel 
and conceived God and His Anointed to take a 
nationalist view. But when taught by the prophets— 
by Amos and Jeremiah, in particular,—a seriously- 
minded Jew began to think, as John the Baptist 
apparently thought, that God could make children of 
Abraham out of the pebbles if He really wanted them, 
that righteousness is of more consequence than any- 
thing else in humanity, that good conscience and good 
conduct are more significant than good blood, blindly 
transmitted by “the will of the flesh ” (John 1. 13) ; 
then God could not be supposed to consign a good 
Gentile to Gehenna, or to promote a doubtful or 
indifferent Jew to heaven, even if that Jew were 
descended from the friend of God and were the seed 
of the patriarchs. In that case, what was the privilege 
of Israel? If the problem of the good Gentile is 
solved by one theory as to the next world, the solution 
involves yet another problem—the problem of the bad 
Jew, who could no longer logically claim the privilege 
of Israel. This was a matter of reflexion sooner or 
later with Paul; can we peremptorily say it was later 
and not sooner? How should he not realize and 
realize early the serious position of a Jew who failed 
to be righteous? And a further question rises; what 
is the function of a Messiah, if righteousness and 
general immortality are to be presumed in the scheme 
of God? What place is there for a restored Israel 
in a heaven where virtue and eternal life are the 
decisive factors? ‘The Davidic King must yield place 
to another conception of the Messiah, if a Messiah is 
needed at all. ‘There were Jews who, long before the 


44 PAUL OF TARSUS 


great Rabbinic period, reached the point of leaving 
the Messiah out altogether, or at least giving him so 
small a function that he might as well not be in the 
scheme of things. It might be truer to say that 
they never reached the point where it seemed needful 
to introduce a Messiah at all.} 

Beside Rabbinic Jews, or their legitimate ancestors, 
there were then Jews interested in Apocalyptic, and 
Jews of a school whose greatest man is Philo. It is 
impossible to say how widely any particular Apocalyp- 
tic book was circulated,? or what attention would be 
paid to it by any given Jew, so to speak. A great deal 
would depend, as with every reader of any book, on 
his literary taste and interests, on his religious pre- 
conceptions and experience. ‘The Apocalyptic writings 
are from a literary point of view worthless, unless we 
except the first half of Daniel, the author of which 
certainly had a gift of narrative far beyond his school. 
How far a strict Jew would attend to such books, 
whether of his own sect’s mind or not, cannot be said 
dogmatically. But the general body of ideas, with 
which the writers of the surviving books worked, was 
in the air, and perhaps to-day we invert their real 
relation, and attribute more influence to the writers 
than they really exercised, and credit them too defi- 
nitely with leading where perhaps they followed. 
But the wide differences between these dreamy 
writers, handling “ things to come” between asleep 
and wake, chaotic in mind as in art,® would allow 
considerable freedom to the reader. He could never 
quite succesfully piece together one apocalypse with 
another, nor always the various parts of a single one ; 

1 More fully discussed on pp. 201 ff. 

2'W. Morgan, Re/igion and Theology of St Paul, p. 10: “ Apocalyptic 
was never the faith of more thanacircle . . . But .. . it was the 
deepest and most earnest spirits that were attracted to it.” 

3 Cf. J. H. Leckie, World to Come, p. 27: “ It is an excellent rule 


to suspect all accounts of Jewish doctrine in proportion as they suggest 
symmetry, order and logical coherence.” 


JERUSALEM 45 


and he was driven, consciously or unconsciously, to 
select and to reject. Every apocalyptist is categorical 
and dogmatic enough, but there was not enough 
agreement to impose a definite faith on the Jewish 
people, The Hellenistic school was a further safe- 
guard; the philosophic temper is a difficult one for 
the prophetic to mate with; it is another illustra- 
tion of that “ancient quarrel” which, Plato says, has 
always existed between poetry and philosophy.1 

So the ardent young Jew from ‘Tarsus, zealous for 
God, zealous for the traditions of the fathers, is 
launched into what was very like University life in 
a pilgrim centre, in a national capital with a foreign 
garrison. How long he was there we do not know, 
nor with whom—apart from Gamaliel, and presum- 
ably other young Pharisees of his own age and sym- 
pathies (Gal. i. 14). That he was associated from an 
early point with the synagogue of the Cilicians is 
probable. ‘The detail of that Jerusalem life is beyond 
us; something of the outline we can reconstruct. 
The opportunities for thought in such a place must 
have been endless, though it is not everybody that 
takes them in a University. Israel, the Gentiles, the 
Messiah, Resurrection, Immortality, Sin and Judg- 
ment, this world with its evil, the next with its 
promise of Right,—how was one to combine all that 
was said on topics of such variety and importance? 
Who was to decide when the doctors disagreed, as 
we know they did? 

Once again, we have to remember that we are 
dealing with an exceptional man, the maker of an 
epoch, intensely serious, perplexingly swift of thought, 
and apt to reach the fundamental more thoroughly 
and more quickly than we suppose. He has been 
studied by millions; of the followers of Jesus none 
has been anything like so formative; every Christian 
who has read him with any attention has formed some 

1 Plato, Republic, x. 607 B. 


46 PAUL OF TARSUS 


impression of him, some judgment upon him. But 
to judge such men takes gifts of sympathy and experi- 
ence more or less commensurate with their own; and 
these are not common. In the story of the Christian 
church two men stand out, qualified beyond others 
by genius and experience, to understand Paul— 
Augustine and Luther. Much material, unknown 
to either of them, is available for the modern scholar ; 
but one is disposed to question whether after all it is 
so important as we sometimes suppose—whether it 
really matters at all, compared with the insight, which 
in Augustine and Luther was given by God and 
developed in life. Genius rather than scholarship is 
the touchstone by which to test genius. 


Cuapter III 
DAMASCUS 


One phase of religious thought in Paul’s Jerusalem 
we have not yet touched—the Christian movement. 
If it is hard to be at all precise about the currents in 
Judaism, it is at least as hard to be certain about the 
early church in Jerusalem. Something turns on the 
date at which Luke wrote the Acts, and still more on 
the sources which he used, and the degree of knowledge 
which he really had of Palestine. When he wrote 
the Gospel, he explained his purpose and plan in his 
preface, and scholars of late years have successfully 
studied his method in careful comparisons between 
Mark’s Gospel and Luke’s borrowings from it, and 
they have also made out another source which both 
Matthew and he used in addition to Mark. In the 
latter part of Acts it is plain that Luke depended on 
Paul himself and Paul’s friends. That he was with 
Paul on some parts of the journeys seems most probable. 
Whatever sources he used for his account of the 
Jerusalem church, it is hard to think that they were 
at all of the same historical value as those which he 
used for the Gospel, or as his own notes of Paul’s 
talk and of their journeys together. It is fairly plain 
that, while a man of wider range and far more literary 
capacity than Mark, and clearly dissatisfied with Mark’s 
style and language and general usage of Greek, Luke 
was very faithful, as ancient historians were perhaps 
too apt to be, to the source before him. ‘The source 
Gf not sources) for the early days of the church in 

1 See the very interesting study of Henry J. Cadbury, Tze Szyle 


and Literary Method of Luke. 
a7 


48 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Jerusalem must rouse a good many suspicions, unless 
we are to say that Luke is responsible for the parallelism 
of the miracles with Jewish history and legend, which 
I think can hardly be urged. Luke is accused at a 
later point of making all sorts of eirenical adjustments, 
which it does not concern us to discuss in detail; he 
may have found Paul’s statements and those which 
he got elsewhere hard to reconcile. Narrative at all 
events was a gift denied to Paul. It may be possible 
to disentangle everything; people have tried it in 
various ways; but happily it is not our task. 

When we come to ask about the church in Jerusalem 
before Paul joined it or even began to persecute it, 
we have the full disadvantage of depending on a not 
too critical historian writing of a land and situation, 
which he did not intimately know, in dependence on 
a very curious authority. It is quite clear that the 
community was full of fervour and courage, quite 
changed from what it had been before the Crucifixion. 
Then it had been uncertain of the mind and the 
future of Jesus, and very slow to take in what he said ; 
it had scattered when the attack was made upon him. 
Now it had a testimony to give—that Jesus was raised 
from the dead; it was perfectly sure of this, and 
stood all sorts of persecution. But it was still confused 
on many points; it was full of the Holy Ghost; it 
gathered adherents freely, but not all of them, we are 
told, of reliable quality (Acts v. 1-11). Its ways 
were odd; it elected an Apostle by a final drawing 
of lots, and it practised communism—the latter 
leading very soon to trouble, while the former practice 
was not, so far as we know, repeated. Altogether 
there is, in spite of all the enthusiasm, the courage 
and benevolence, a want of nearly every other quality 
that we associate with the mind of Jesus. 

Luke gives us a number of speeches delivered by 
Peter. ‘To Sir William Ramsay all students of the 
New ‘Testament are indebted for a great deal of new 


DAMASCUS 49 


light on Luke’s fidelity to the facts of the Roman 
Empire and its geography—a signal contribution. 
But when he asks us to believe that Luke is verbally 
faithful to Peter, so faithful as to keep a Greek word 
which Peter used in a speech but afterwards discarded 
for a better in his Epistle,! those who study ancient 
historians can only open their eyes in amazement. 
When he also turns ‘‘ the angel of the Lord” who 
“came upon” Peter*—the normal term for a 
theophany in pagan narrative and for an angel’s 
coming in the New Testament—into Manaen, Herod’s 
foster brother,? he makes Luke’s procedure the 
harder to explain. Scholars generally will not want 
to press the verbal faithfulness of those speeches; it 
will be a good deal if they are free to allow some corre- 
spondence of content. Certainly the speeches are 
quite different in texture from the recorded talk of 
Jesus in the Synoptic gospels, which is all short—it is 
fragmentary, and one sces that it is authentic, saved 
by its own life and humour and pungency; the story 
of the Prodigal Son is the longest connected piece. 
Peter’s speeches are very different and a cautious 
historian will handle them uneasily. Dr Hastings 
Rashdall holds that, when we reach the speech of 
Stephen, we have far more certainly “‘a genuine and 
most interesting monument of the earliest Christian 
thought.” 4 With Stephen and Gamaliel we come 
into the area where Paul can be counted among 
Luke’s authorities, and Paul apparently had reason to 
remember the gist of that speech, perhaps some of its 
words. 

Some light may be shed on that early church from 
what is actually known of its later history, which 
is little; from the Epistle of James, and from the 
character of Jewish Christianity so far as it kept aloof 
from the general body of Christ’s followers. ‘There 

1 Compare, in the Greek, Acts iv. 11, and 1 Peter il. 7. 

* Acts xi. 7. ® Acts xill. I. 4 Idea of Atonement, p. 77. 

D 


50 PAUL OF TARSUS 


results a rather slow and uncertain Christology ; 
Christ is not all that he becomes to Paul, to the 
writer to the Hebrews, to the fourth evangelist, to 
the author of the Apocalypse. That early church 
was the trustee of the sayings of Jesus, and preserved 
them, for which alone we owe it a boundless debt ; 
it comprised the witnesses (before Paul) of the resur- 
rection and it bore its testimony; it had something 
to say of the ascension—a matter easier for men who 
believed in a geocentric astronomy and a solid sky, 
with Horace, perhaps, and the Apocalyptist.1_ It was 
not however very clear as to the person and work of 
Christ. Even the speeches of Peter, while touching 
on the resurrection, the ascension and the second 
coming (Acts iil. 20), do not go beyond calling Jesus 
“the holy and the just,” “ prince (apynyor) of life” 3 
(Acts ill. 14, 15), “prince (dpynydv) and saviour’ 
(gernpa) 2 (v. 31), and associating with him “ ae 
giveness ”? (v. 31)—the last a very important point, if 
not thrown back by natural reflex from the language 
of a later day. Finally, the early church remained 
very much unaware of where it was going. 

For, to put the issue bluntly and at once, it seems 
hardly to have been conscious that it was in any 
peculiar sense a “‘ church.” ‘The word may involve 
not a little anachronism, and it certainly suggests too 
many associations, too many controversies, to be used 
of this body of early Christians in Jerusalem without 
further reflexion. We must try to picture a group 
of people, as we have seen, without any very clear 
Christology, but conscious of a new loyalty and of 
a new experience, which they wished to share with 
their neighbours—so happy it was. We read of Peter 


1 Horace, Odes, III. iii. 7, si fractus illabatur orbis; and Rev. 
Pee 

*'The presence of the word, cw77p, itself suggests a later date 
for the present form of the speech. It belongs chiefly to the later 
strata of the New Testament. 


DAMASCUS 51 


preaching apparently on the street from a door or a 
window (Acts ii.) but also in Solomon’s Porch of the 
Temple (Acts il. 11), which was in fact for a time 
the recognized meeting-place of the group (Acts v. 12). 
There were gatherings of avowed adherents of Jesus 
by themselves, but the routine or ritual—we must 
not be too precise—of their religious life had still to 
some extent a centre in the Temple; “day by day 
they continued with one spirit (or mind) in the 
Temple” (Acts 11. 46). At the very end of the Acts 
we find the same thing; Paul, on the advice of the 
brethren in Jerusalem, went through some conspicu- 
ously Jewish rites in the Temple (Acts xxi. 26, 27)— 
a procedure not very consonant with the latest of his 
writings, which show a further development. How 
strange all this was may not occur to every reader of 
the New Testament at once. But when one recalls 
the episode of the cleansing of the Temple by Jesus, 
and reflects upon what he found there—a market full 
of birds and cattle, the whole apparatus of money- 
changing and buying and selling, a ‘‘ den of thieves ” 
reeking of cow-dung and blood, and crowded with the 
agents of a mercantilized religion—it grows strange 
that men and women, taught by Jesus a new way in 
religion, could still endure to worship in such a place 
along with those who killed him; but they did. We 
read, moreover, that “‘a great crowd of the priests 
became obedient to the faith” (Acts vi. 7); and, if 
we ask whether they continued to minister along the 
old lines in the old place, it is hard to think that they 
abruptly ceased to do so. But how long did they 
continue, and how came the cessation of their sacri- 
ficial service ? 

The reference to the synagogue of the Cilicians 
reminds us of a double strand in Judaism. ‘The 
Temple obviously did not minister to all the spiritual 
needs that the synagogue had taught Jews to recog- 
nize. ‘The practice, maintained by Paul for years, 


52 PAUL OF TARSUS 


of resorting to the local synagogue, wherever he went, 
and beginning his mission by preaching there, suggests 
that Stephen’s activity was similarly in a synagogue, 
and that it was in the synagogue of the Cilicians he 
preached “full of charm and power.” ‘There was 
bound to be cleavage. Temple and synagogue were 
inevitably to be impossible centres for Christian 
preaching. ‘There could not permanently be much 
sympathy between men who said that Jesus is Lord 
and men who said “ Jesus is anathema ” (1 Cor. xii. 3). 
Division, taking the form of persecution, was inevit- 
able and it cleared the issue. The strange thing 1s 
that Temple and synagogue could have been used 
so long. 

Professor B. W. Bacon of Yale distinguishes two 
persecutions, the first by the priestly party or. political 
grounds, which soon ceased; the latter a more im- 
portant one raised by the clash of Stephen with the 
Hellenizing Jews, and the Cilicians among them. 
And here Paul comes into the story, as the church 
has never forgotten ;—“ the witnesses laid down their 
clothes at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul.” 4 
With what synagogue but that of the Cilicians could 
that ‘‘citizen of Tarsus” be connected? He must have 
been involved in the controversy with Stephen from 
the very first; he was not built to be neutral or even 
moderate. So he goes on and makes “ havock of the 
church, entering into every house, and haling men 
and women committed them to prison,” ? and thereby 
disseminates the contagion he is trying to stamp out. 

From the story of Stephen and his speech, from the 
standard objections of the Jews to early Christianity, 
from Paul’s own letters, we may feel our way to some 
account of the ground he took in opposition to the 
new religion. Luke may have thrown back into the 
early period the fuller recognition which the differ- 
ences between the Jewish and Christian communities 

1 Acts vii. 58. 2 Acts viii. 2 


wv* 


DAMASCUS 53 


at last reached. We have to remember that Paul’s 
was a life of ‘‘ revelation,”’ however we define the 
term; and he did not necessarily see from the begin- 
ning all he discovered with time, nor need we suppose 
patent to the insight of the Jews of the first half- 
century what a later generation could see without any 
insight at all. ‘The two religions, as the new one 
developed, were bound to move further and further 
apart; from the first it was inevitable. Jesus was 
not crucified for nothing by the common action of 
priests and Pharisees. If his disciples did not guess 
the reason, his enemies were clear enough. With 
those enemies Paul was consorting, and what they saw 
and spoke of, it is hard to suppose him slow to under- 
stand. We may summarize the main points under 
four or five heads. 

Whatever Israel might properly hope for, or expect, 
in a Messiah, if a Messiah there was to be at all, it 
was clear to Paul and his friends that Jesus could not 
possibly be the Messiah. If Christian historians pro- 
duced pedigrees connecting him with David, they 
also preserved enough of his talk to show that he set 
very little by the connexion. ‘‘ How say the scribes 
that Christ is the son of David?” he asked.1 Per- 
haps the Messiah was not to be strictly a son of David, 
but no one as yet had suggested that he was to be a 
peasant, a carpenter, a homeless vagrant ; that, so far 
from restoring the Kingdom to Israel, he was to be 
crucified by the foreigner. A Messiah crucified was 
to the Jews a stumbling-block,? a contradiction in 
terms; and so it remained. ‘The Law had said quite 
plainly that “he that is hanged is accursed of God,” 
and had given special injunctions for the immediate 
burial of such a person before sundown; his body 
was not to remain all night on the tree “that thy 

1 Mark xii. 35. 

21 Cor. i. 23; cf. Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 32; also The 
Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire, chap. v1. 


54 PAUL OF TARSUS 


land be not defiled.”.1 We know that this was a 
passage which Paul thought over, and in later days it 
gave him a comfort that was not to be expected. ‘The 
Christian propaganda of the crucified Jesus as the 
Messiah had thus in it everything to revolt a patriotic 
Jew, who loved his race and its hopes, who was con- 
scious of the mockery of the foreigner, who believed 
the Law to be the very word of God, given by angels, 
and in a manner of speaking almost an incarnation of 
God. The cross was for centuries the point of 
attack, and while, as we see, it became the very centre 
and inspiration of Paul’s religion, he remained sensitive 
to the shame of it.2_ He knew exactly what men felt 
and said about it, because he had felt and said the 
same. 

As for the Resurrection of Jesus, there again Paul 
had opportunity to learn how it affected men. The 
Greeks at Athens simply laughed when he spoke of it, 
and the discussion was at an end at once. Luke tells 
us that, from the first, the priests and Sadducees were 
vexed that the Christians “‘ preached through Jesus 
the resurrection of the dead”? 4—it was all counter to 
Sadducee belief, as we know. ‘That Paul counted 
the story a sheer fabrication, seems confirmed by the 
emphasis which, later on, he always lays on the risen 
Jesus, and on his vision of him alive. ‘Those who 
alleged that Jesus was raised from the dead were 
“false witnesses against God,’’® so that their talk was 
not only silly but sinful. 

Another point was the Law. Luke is very fitful in 
his treatment of chronology; apart from his state- 
ments that Paul was eighteen months at Corinth 
(Acts xvill. 11), two years at Ephesus (xix. 10) and 
two years a prisoner at Caesarea (xxiv. 27), he gives no 
dates of any consequence in the Acts. ‘The reference 

1 Deut.sx1.-2 3s Gali 242 

» Gal'y. 21 3° 1 Cor: 4: 1B-11.73: ® Acts xvil. 32. 

* Acts iv./2,:18, 33 3) ¥.28, 40. 5: Cot xyeee 


DAMASCUS 55 


to the coming of Gallio, while Paul was at Corinth, 
gives us our solitary fixed date. Géallio’s proconsulate 
fellina.p. 52. We are left to guess how long was the 
period between the Crucifixion of Jesus and the con- 
version of Paul; it has been estimated at something 
vaguely between one year and six. In that interval 
it became perfectly clear to people who cared for 
clearness that the Gospel was not going to strengthen 
the position of the Law. When Jesus said: ‘ ‘Think 
not that | am come to destroy the law, or the prophets,” 
and predicted that no jot or tittle should go unfulfilled, 
either Matthew (v. 17-20) or his modern interpreters 
may be accused of lack of imagination, if the one, or 
the other, really suppose that Jesus meant his followers 
to maintain the Law of Moses, as the Pharisees tried 
to keep it. It was very early evident that, in the new 
relations with God which Jesus had made possible for 
men (long as it was before the church made up its 
mind to a definite theory to cover the facts), one thing 
at least was certain—the days of righteousness by the 
Law were past, the Law was becoming obsolete. 
According to Luke, it was not till Peter had com- 
mitted himself with Cornelius that the question was 
discussed with any urgency among Christians at 
Jerusalem, and the rest of the Acts is never long free 
from echoes of the controversy ; so conservative can 
Christians be and so unobservant. ‘Their enemies saw 
the end a great deal more clearly and more quickly. 
Accordingly one part of the charge against Stephen 
concerned the Law. ‘The scandal put about was to 
the effect that ‘‘ we have heard him speak blasphemous 
words against Moses and against God” (Acts vi. 11). 
When he is brought to trial, it is put more explicitly. 
“This man ceaseth not to speak blasphemous words 
against this holy place and the law ; for we have heard 
him say, that this Jesus of Nazareth shall destroy this 
place and shall change the customs which Moses 
delivered us” (vi. 13). To change customs was 


56 PAUL OF TARSUS 


tantamount to destruction of nationality.1 Stephen’s 
defence turns chiefly on another controversial point, 
really of more significance, viz., the suffering, rejection 
and death of Jesus; but at the end he touches on 
Temple and Law, not obscurely for those who under- 
stand, while to his court it meant that he pled guilty. 
“‘Howbeit the Most High dwelleth not in temples 
made with hands; as saith the prophet, Heaven is 
my throne, and earth is my footstool: what house 
will ye build me? saith the Lord: or what is the place 
of my rest? Hath not my hand made all these 
things?” ? ‘This, coming after a survey of Israel’s 
history, and with the conclusion: ‘‘ Which of the 
prophets have not your fathers persecuted?” and 
the counter-charge that the court trying him “ have 
received the law by the disposition of angels (as it 
was ordained by angels) and have not kept it,” con- 
firmed the worst alleged against the Christian com- 
munity. They had principles of universalism, which 
must tell against Israelite privilege; they were not 
loyal to Temple and Law. ‘To translate all this into 
blasphemy against Moses and God was no more than 
controversy can always manage. And, latent in his 
defence, was a suggestion of an explanation for the 
sufferings of Christ, which appears not to have been 
lost on Paul, hostile as he was for the time. 

In any case we have a strong indictment for an 
ardent young Jewish patriot to bring against the new 
sect—the change of Israelite custom, involving the 
disappearance of Israel’s nationality; contempt for 
the Law and a clear menace to the Law’s continuance 


1 The mark of a tyrant was to change national customs (Herodotus, 
lil. 80). The stories of Cambyses’ treatment of Egyptian religious 
customs (Herodotus, ii. 16, 38) and of Macedonian resentment of 
Alexander’s Persian robes (Arrian, Azabasis, vil. 6, 23 8, 2) 
illustrate this. 

2 Acts vil. 48-50; quoting Isaiah Ixvi. 1, 2, a passage used by the 
Apologists against the Jews, Justin, Trypho, 22; First Apology, 373 
Barnabas, 16, 2; Cyprian, Testimonia, il. 4, c. 


DAMASCUS 57 


and validity; a hideous parody of the Messianic 
hope; and, implicitly, the final abandonment of 
Israel to Roman rule. There were also matters 
personal to Paul; if their view of God was right, all 
his endeavours after righteousness according to the 
Law were misdirected and needless ; he had blundered, 
and wasted his energy; what was gain to him was 
after all really loss ;—a conclusion that no man could 
welcome. And we must not forget the man’s passion 
for truth and his resentment of lies; he could not but 
resent the falsehood of the Resurrection story in any 
case; how much more when it involved God? No 
wonder that Paul was “consenting” to Stephen’s 
death—or, to render the Greek (ovvevdoxov) in 
language of our own day, that he thoroughly approved 
of it. 

I cannot help feeling that Gamaliel’s action had a 
share in developing the persecutor in Paul. Luke 
tells us how, at an early appearance of the Apostles 
on trial, ‘‘ there stood up one in the council, a Pharisee, 
named Gamaliel, a doctor of the law, had in reputa- 
tion among all the people,” and advised the Jewish 
authorities to wait and see; to let the men alone; 
“‘ for if this counsel or work be of men, it will come to 
nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow 
it ; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.” ? 
Hesitation is the badge of the scholar tribe. Erasmus 
was a difficulty to men of his day; he would 
not definitely side with Luther nor wholeheartedly 
condemn him. We may readily believe that this 
information from within about Gamaliel came to 
Luke from Paul, and that the moderation of his 
teacher impressed him, both before and after his 
conversion. If afterwards he felt the wisdom of the 
older man, at the time it would have been less than 
human nature for the young and ardent Paul notte 
resent the ‘‘ trimming” of the cautious Gamaliel ; 


1 Acts v. 34-39. 


58 - PAUL OF TARSUS 


and Paul always had plenty of human nature, and was 
quick to respond to its promptings. It would not 
be unnatural if this spectacle of vacillation in one 
whom he regarded fired him with indignation,! and if 
indignation drove him (as it sometimes did later on) 
into action more fierce than we might properly have 
supposed native to a disposition so obviously built for 
friendship. But after all there would be little to 
surprise us in that. 

But there is another phase of the matter yet to be 
considered. In two narratives of the vision at the 
gate of Damascus, we read that the words: “It is 
hard for thee to kick against the goad” were among 
those that came to Paul. It has been suggested that 
the phrase was from Pindar; but the indignant ox, 
harnessed to the plough, tossing the yoke which it 
cannot throw off,? and kicking out at the ploughman 
whom it cannot reach, was not a sight for which it 
was necessary to go to the poems of Pindar. Paul 
may very well have seen it that very morning on his 
journey; and the poor beast, kicking in vain at a man 
separated from it by the length of the plough, and 
only hurting itself afresh with each kick at the in- 
evitable goad, may have stayed in his mind as a picture 
of humanity, till it was brought home to him: “ Thou 
art the man.” 

It is most likely that, in spite of his indignation 
with Gamaliel, Paul felt some qualms suggested by 
his friend’s uncertainty—qualms none the easier for 
his trying to overcome them (as men do) by committing 


1 In Romans xvi. 7, Paul alludes to “ my kinsmen Andronicus and 
Junia, my fellow-prisoners, who are of note among the apostles, who 
also were in Christ before me.” Can we add their conversion to the 
grounds of indignation and of ferment within him? ‘The coupling 
of their names (the feminine Latin and implying Roman citizen- 
ship) suggests man and wife; who were they, and who was 
** Herodion my kinsman ” of verse 11? 

2 Cf. Juvenal, xii. 20: Ducimus autem Hos quoque felices, qui ferre 
incommoda vite Nec factare jugum vita didicere magistra. 


DAMASCUS 59 


himself more deeply. It has already been suggested 
that he had also to fight against the consequences of 
long familiarity with the Hellenistic world; here too 
he was divided against himself, and (as befalls men in 
such a state) he was the more violent on one side 
because he wished to be on both sides. A youth 
passed in Gentile surroundings, a manhood devoted 
to work among Gentiles, hang together; and 
somewhere under the surface it is hardly overbold 
to surmise that a lifetime’s instinct was making a 
fierce struggle against the theory of a season—his 
humanism against his tribalism; and the latter be- 
trays the uneasiness of its temporary triumph by its 
violence. 

Then again, in the speech made from the steps to 
the crowd in Jerusalem, we are reminded by Paul 
himself of his part in the martyrdom of Stephen 
(Acts xxii. 20), planned by men of his own synagogue, 
in all likelihood with his approval from the first. 
Whatever part rewriting — condensing, abridging, 
“altering things to keep them the same”—had in 
Luke’s work, we may be pretty sure that he was better 
informed of Paul’s mind, and even of his usual ways 
of speech, than he was in Peter’s case. Ordinary 
probability supports us here. What impression must 
that death of Stephen have made on a young man, 
bigoted, but affectionate and open-hearted, and uneasy 
in mind? We know from himself how his nature was 
torn in two by the struggle against sin; and here was 
a man, being slowly butchered, and entirely at peace 
with God. Paul felt the contrast; he was himself 
not at peace with God. ‘The miserably slow process of . 
the death left Paul the longer time to study the dying 
man, his face, his bearing, and the scene. A century 
and a half later, Tertullian tells us of the effect of the 
martyr’s death in his day,—the tranquillity of the 
martyr amid the hideous shouting and hatred of the 
mob, the uneasiness of the spectator, and the force 


60 PAUL OF TARSUS 


of the contrast.1 ‘‘ No one would have wished to be 
killed,” he says, ‘* unless he knew he had the truth.” ? 
It seems, indeed, as if Tertullian were telling his own 
story there;* and there is a good deal in common 
between Tertullian and Paul—the swiftness of mind, 
the passion for truth, the headlong temperament. 
Paul may very well have reckoned Stephen’s death a 
landmark. 

Finally, on this point, to whom does Luke owe the 
story of the vision dying Stephen saw? Who of the 
bystanders would tell it to Luke? Paul seems as 
likely to have heard Stephen’s last words for himself 
as to have learnt them from Luke. The dying man, 
face to face with death, eternity and judgment to 
come—the things that made Paul, as well as Felix, 
tremble,—said he saw in an opened heaven the glory 
of God and Jesus standing on the right hand of God ; 
and in converse (as it appeared) with Jesus, expecting 
to be with him in a moment and forgiving the men 
who were killing him, Stephen died, happy. Life 
often teaches men to be suspicious, or at least cautious ; 
and Paul must have turned all this over in his mind 
a great many times. He cannot always have found it 
quite easy to convince himself that the men who 
threw the stones, the mob who would have stolen the 
clothes, were right in God’s sight; or that Stephen 
was acting a part and was lying with his last breath. 
Stephen had been no trimmer in life; and he appeared 
to be candid in death. His face was not the face of 
a liar—it was more like an angel (Acts vi. 15). If so, 
then what did he see? Was it possible that Jesus 
still lived, as the Christians said? Paul had not our 
modern psychology, which, modern as it is for the 
present, has perhaps not solved all the problems. He 
was confronted with a dilemma; either Stephen lied 

1’'Tertullian, Apology, 50; ad Scapulam, 5. 


* Tertullian, Scorpiace, 8. 


8 See Conflict of Religions in Early Roman Empire, p. 320. 


DAMASCUS 61 


to the last, or else—or else there might be something 
in the Christian story of the risen Jesus; and, if he 
dismissed the second alternative, the former was not 
very easy either. We can imagine him perplexed in 
the extreme—growingly angry with himself and as a 
result more violent, as if to force himself away from 
distasteful hypotheses or doubts, and more savage 
with his work of persecution. Ego fiebam miserior et 
tu propinquior, wrote Augustine of a similar interval 
in his own experience—‘‘ I grew more miserable, and 
thou nearer; thy right hand was even then to catch 
me out of the mire and to wash me, and I knew it 
not;” and he too speaks of the fear of death and 
judgment, which never left him through all his changes 
of opinion.? 

Paul took refuge in action, as men do; but even 
action has its interludes, one cannot be active every 
moment—least of all a man of his swiftness of mind, 
and suddenness of thought. Action in his case, 
when it meant widespread arrests and a journey to 
Damascus, involved associates. We can guess what 
these associates were—how little congenial to the 
troubled man in charge of them, and how ill they 
showed in contrast with their victims. Every arrest 
repeated the reminder of the dying Stephen and 
the men who killed him. So the Damascus gate 
is reached. 

Here, if it seem that we have been using conjecture 
already, more conjecture awaits us, and happily a new 
area of clearness and certainty beyond it. ‘There has 
been, as there was bound to be, a great deal of discussion 
as to what happened at the gate of Damascus. Pro- 
fessor Percy Gardner, for instance, says that there is 
no excuse for taking the Lucan account for sober 
history; that Luke has a love for the marvellous, 
and the bright light, the vision and the words may be 
due to him; and that the three narratives differ in 


1 Augustine, Confessions, vi. 16, 26. 


62 PAUL OF TARSUS 


essential points.1 Professor B. W. Bacon holds that 
the discrepancies, which Luke might perfectly well 
have removed, if he had cared to take the trouble, 
prove “the uncritical popular character” of the 
story.2. It can, however, hardly be maintained, by 
any real student of Luke, that Luke invented the 
whole episode, the light, the words, and the vision ; 
whatever he does with them in his narrative, it seems 
incredible that he is not drawing upon Paul’s own 
account of something that happened. 

But the discrepancies are surely not central, or 
essential. How much did the companions hear or 
see? is not a question of prime importance. If 
Paul, or Luke, fluctuated on this point, it should be 
remembered that affidavits sworn to by the companions 
would probably have varied a good deal, or, if they 
had all agreed, would have been no better evidence. 
In any case, what the companions may have supposed 
to have happened, matters to nobody. If it is said 
that Luke ought to have made all his narratives tally 
to the last detail, history is not written by lawyers 
nor logicians, nor perhaps any other literature that 
lives. As to what we are told that Paul saw, heard 
and said, the agreement is substantial, though in 
addressing Agrippa Paul rather “telescopes” his 
narrative, as he did the story of the Antioch dis- 
agreement when he wrote to the Galatians. A table 
may clear things at this point, giving the narratives of 
chapters 1x., xxil. and xxvi. in parallel columns: 


ix. XXU. XXVi. 
verse verse verse 
3 Suddenly there 6 Suddenly there 13 I sawa light from 
shined round about shone a_ great heaven above the 
him a light from light from heaven brightness of the 
heaven. round about me. sun shining round 


about me and 
them that jour- 
neyed with me. 


1P. Gardner, Religious Experience of St Paul, p. 29. 
2B. W. Bacon, Paul, p. 45. 


ix, 
verse 
4 He fell to the 
earth. 


4 He heard a voice 
saying unto him. 


7 (they hearing a 
voice) 

4 Saul, Saul, why 
persecutest thou 
me? 


5 And he said, 

5 Who art 
Lord ? 

5 And the Lord said, 


thou, 


5 I am Jesus whom 
thou persecutest ; 


5 It is hard for thee 
to kick against the 
pricks. 

6 And he, trembling 
and astonished said, 

6 Lord, what wilt 
thou have me todo? 

6 And the Lord said 
unto him, 

6 Arise, and go into 
the city, 

6 And it shall be 
told thee what 
thou must do. 


DAMASCUS 


XXil. 


verse 


9 They that were 
with me saw in- 
deed the light, and 
were afraid. 

7 1 fell unto the 
ground. 

7 1 heard a voice 
saying unto me. 


g (they heard not 


the voice) 

7 Saul, Saul, why 
persecutest thou 
me? 


8 And I answered, 


8 Who rt thou, 
Lord ? 

8 And he said unto 
me, 

8 I am Jesus of 


Nazareth, whom 
thou persecutest. 


10 And I said, 


10 What shall I do, 
Lord? 

10 And the Lord said 
unto me, 

to Arise, and go into 
Damascus; 

10 And there it shall 
be told thee of all 
things which are 
appointed for thee 
to do. 


63 


XXVi. 


verse 


14. We were all fallen 
to the earth. 

14 I heard a voice 
speaking unto me 

14 in the Hebrew 
tongue, 


14 Saul, Saul, why 
persecutest thou 
me? 

14 It is hard for thee 
to kick against the 
pricks. 

15 And I said, 

15 Who art 
Lord ? 

15 And he said, 


thou, 


15 I am Jesus whom 
thou persecutest. 


16 But rise, and stand 
upon thy feet. 


16 [The call to go to 
the Gentiles is 
given. | 


64 PAUL OF TARSUS 
To-day psychologists will group this episode with 


similar or apparently similar ones in the experience of 
other men; and it is not unreasonable. I believe 
that in such cases the words are generally few and are 
indelible from the memory. ‘That Paul saw or seemed 
to see a great light, shining all round himself and his 
companions, and that he fell, wil] strike no one as odd 
to-day ; and it fits in exactly that he should uniformly 
give the words alike, and that they are direct and 
few. Any one who has had any experience of the 
receipt of words, whatever his theory about their 
origination, will know how clear and definite they 
are, and will be able to give them long after, and 
frequently to add the exact spot at which they “‘ were 
given’? or “‘came.” Paul also “saw’”—and not 
infrequently, as his own writings and Luke both tell 
us. ‘The first remark to be made may be given in 
Weinel’s words: 3 “ The particular form, which Paul’s 
conversion assumed, was surely caused quite as much 
by the strange psychology which was then universally 
accepted, as by the picture of Christ taken over from 
Judaism.” A modern man, not unfamiliar with the 
psychology of to-day, might see the same figure and 
hear like words, and yet not suppose that what he saw 
was objective nor that what he heard was audible to 
another, and still might realize that it was a critical 
moment, which would be decisive for him. 

It is put in this way to-day. So many things are 
working within him, as we have seen, and in conflict ; 
and with a flash—it is odd how spontaneous English 
phrase hits off a co-incidence—comes a light, and at 
any rate one problem is solved. Suppose (it is said) 
that the sufferings of Jesus, his rejection and death, 
are, as Stephen said, exactly along the line of the true 
prophets, and, so far from discrediting the Messiah, 
prove his true succession and authenticate him? And 


1H. Weinel, St Paul, the Man and his Work, p. 148 (tr.). Cf. 
below p. 185. 


DAMASCUS 6s 


again, if Israel claimed or expected some acceptance 
with God, or some consideration from God, in virtue 
of the merits of the patriarchs (as we saw), can the 
sufferings of Jesus serve the same end, and, instead of 
being the final proof of God’s damnation of him, 
mean a new footing for men in approaching God? 
Now both these ideas require development and de- 
finition—tasks on which Paul and others have spent 
their lives; but their sudden realization may go far 
to explain what happened at the Damascus gate. 

I think it is reasonably maintained that visions, in 
or out of the mystical state, and words received (and 
other experiences, whatever they may be, that fall 
into this class) have their form and content from 
what is already working consciously or subconsciously 
within the man’s mind who has the experience. It 
comes, then, briefly to this: are we to say that the 
line of thought, culminating suddenly in a new clarity, 
produces the vision, or that the vision leads to the 
clarification of the thought? Probably many psy- 
chologists to-day, professed and amateur, would prefer 
to say the former; Paul said the latter. There 1s 
this to be said for the modern view, that different 
minds reach conviction in different ways—slowly or 
quickly putting things together, and gaining a new 
view as the result, but figuring the process to 
themselves in different terms, putting it in different 
language, and sometimes associating the change with 
some experience or sensation which may be novel. 
Plato’s ‘‘ old quarrel between poetry and philosophy ” 
is not unconnected with these differences. Reason and 
intuition and instinct are terms used to express the 
routes by which conviction is reached; though it is 
not clear that they do not imply all exactly the same 
route travelled over at different rates of speed. When 
John Bunyan was seized with a new view of things, 
he might see it, he often did see it, in a mental picture ; 
things fell naturally into picture form for him, as they 

z 


66 PAUL OF TARSUS 


do for the artist. But Bunyan was also conscious of 
hearing a voice—at least, as he thought it out, he had 
the sensation (as we put it) of hearing it: “ It would 
sound so loud within me, yea, and, as it were, call 
so strongly after me, that once, above all the rest, I 
turned my head over my shoulder, thinking verily 
that some man had, behind me, called me.” 1 ‘The 
daimonion, the vague “rather supernatural thing,” of 
which Socrates spoke*—the warning he used to get 
somehow—is another illustration of my point. It is 
arguable that Paul “visualized” his profoundest 
experiences—saw when he felt most deeply—saw or 
heard (or both) when a premonition (which also is a 
vague word) reached him, or when a course (as in 
travel*) became clear to him, or, as at the Damascus 
gate, when a new idea or adjustment of ideas swept 
without warning into his mind. 

At the same time our warrant for excluding the 
possibility of a risen Jesus of his own choice showing 
himself to Paul, as the disciples said he did to them, 
cannot be unimpeachable. However difficult it be to 
prove it, we have no moral right, or intellectual right, 
to rule out that alternative. It was so that Paul 
always interpreted this experience, though others of 
the kind he referred to the angel of the Lord. Angels 
and spirits are indeed constantly reported as seen by 
persons of a lower culture than that to which we aspire ; 
but again we have no right perhaps to dogmatize on 
what may be possible to persons who have gone further 
than we have. 

But after all whether the word or vision be (to use 
hackneyed terms of to-day, not quite scientific but 
useful) objective or subjective in its origin, that is not 
the most important point. Does the idea conveyed, 

1 Grace Abounding, §§ 94, 95. 2 Plato, Apo/., 31 D. 

* Cf. Acts xvi. 6, 7,9. ‘The last of these was a vision in the night, 
perhaps a dream: on which compare a Jewish view given in Ecclesi- 


asticus xxxvil. 14: “A man’s soul is sometime wont to bring him 
tidings, more than seven watchmen that sit on high on a watchtower.” 


DAMASCUS 67 


or, if we prefer it, the thought grasped, the issue 
realized, correspond tothe real? Does it take us further 
into the interpretation of all our experience, or does it 
side-track us and land us in some impossible contra- 
diction? Paul checked his revelation by the rest of 
his reflective and emotional life, rationalized it, and 
found in fact that it was no odd or stray addition to 
his outfit, but a key that unlocked for him the meaning 
of his own experience, the meaning of Israel’s history 
—patriarchs, prophets, and psalmists, and the purposes 
of God for the whole of mankind. ‘“ It pleased God, 
who separated me from my mother’s womb and 
called me by his grace, to reveal his Son in me”; so 
says Paul to the Galatians (i. 15, 16). If, with some 
historians, we say that this is all that can be said as 
to his conversion, and decide to suspend judgment 
on Luke’s data, Paul’s statement here is enough. He 
knew at once that a great change of life was before 
him; and, if Luke had not told us, we could have 
guessed that he would ask, “‘ Lord, what wilt thou 
have me to do?” He continues, to the Galatians: 
“‘ Immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood,” 
and he explains that when, later on, fourteen years 
after, he talked things over with those ‘‘ who seemed 
to be pillars,” those ““ who seemed to be somewhat ” 
had nothing additional to give him, adda tovvavriov 
—‘‘ but contrariwise.”’ } 

To this revelation of the living Jesus Paul constantly 
returned. The conviction, reached then for ever, 
that Jesus lives, became the most effectual and opera- 
tive force in his own life. ‘‘ He habitually conceives 
of Christ as clothed in the 6d€a or Divine radiance 
in which he first beheld him at Damascus,” 2 and the 
experience was confirmed by a lifetime. It could not, 
one feels rightly or wrongly, have been so momentous, 
if it had not been led up to in some such way as we 
have supposed. A decisive experience must properly 

1 Gal. ii. 9, 6, 7. 9 H.R. Mackintosh, Person of Christ, p. 54+ 


68 PAUL OF TARSUS 


decide something; and, if there was nothing that 
needed to be decided and was decided, the intensity 
of Paul’s feeling has very little meaning. ‘The great 
epoch-making conversions, however sudden some of 
them may seem, have generally not been unheralded. 
To the men whom Paul brought to Damascus, to the 
authorities who sent them, and (as we learn) to the 
Christians, Paul’s conversion was a bolt from a blue 
sky ; but he knew the prelude of storm as they did not. 

It will be well to survey the points that were decided. 
First of all, Jesus lived; the Resurrection story, Paul 
now saw, was true. God had shown him His Son ;1! 
no experience could be more wonderful, more defini- 
tive. The whole of Paul’s subsequent thought is 
based on the truth of the Resurrection, on Christ 
working in the power of an infinite life, a “ working 
whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself ” ? 
—“ declared to be the Son of God with power, accord- 
ing to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from 
the dead.” Jesus from that moment is for Paul 
a divine being, and the identity is patent of the 
historical Jesus and the Risen Christ.4 It will not be 
out of the way to recall here the vision of the dying 
Stephen—it is the same that Paul sees, and the 
co-incidence (if the word may be used without its 
suggestion of accident) is significant. ‘The psychologist 
may hold that the one has suggested the other; every 
vision, every mystical experience, it may be held, has 
its starting-point in something without. But, how- 
ever we may explain it or phrase it, the connexion is 
surely not a chance one. 

In the next place, the Cross 1s explained, and it 
wins the central place, which it kept in Paul’s thinking. 
Christianity for Paul ‘‘ consists, first and last, of ex- 
periences generated in the believer by the Cross.” § 

1 Gal. i, 16. 2 Phil. iii. 21. $ Rom. i. 4. 
*R. H. Strachan, Individuality of St Paul, pp. 77, 90. 
§ J. Denney. 


DAMASCUS 69 


It is no longer a stumbling-block, as Paul says it 
remained to the Jews, who missed its meaning; he 
holds its meaning, and it becomes for him the criterion 
by which everything in heaven and earth and history 
is judged. The “suffering” of Christ, a scandal to 
the Gentile philosopher as well as to the Jew, becomes 
the very thing that makes him Christ, the proof of 
his Messiahship, the revelation of his nature, and his 
real and eternal glory. It is the pledge of a love on 
God’s part that no one could have dreamed, nor, 
without the Cross, believed. 

In the third place, the whole difficult problem of 
Righteousness, of Sin and Forgiveness, is solved. ‘The 
Cross is reconciliation, and ‘‘ we have peace with 
God.” 1 To this tortured man, haunted with the 
sense of failure, anxious about God’s judgment, and 
convicted already, there was new life in the revelation 
that God loved him to the point of giving His Son for 
him—‘*‘ God commendeth his love toward us in that, 
while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” ? 
Hereafter, terror is not among the emotions roused 
by the thought of God in the mind of Paul; it is 
the love of God that absorbs him and surprises him, 
and (as a critic has said) disorganizes his grammar—a 
love too great to get into words and sentences, a love 
that produces aphasia—as the epistle of Peter puts it, 
“joy unspeakable and glorified.” ‘This new conviction 
has the power to break the bonds of old habits, old 
prejudices, and old preconceptions, and to lead Paul 
on to new life—new with a newness that never grows 
stale and with the freshness of perpetual revelation. 
Wonder, according to Aristotle, is the source of 
philosophy ; and Paul’s undying wonder makes his 
theology. 

The problem of Israel is solved too. God is not 
rejecting Israel; but the choice of Israel proves to be 
a better thing than Israel supposed, it is not an end 


more V,). Ty 2 Rom. v. 8. 


70 PAUL OF TARSUS 


in itself, but a means to a higher and more wonderful 
end. It was not that Israel is chosen and there’s an 
end of it; not at all, to Israel is foreshown, and with 
Israel is shared, God’s larger purpose for mankind. 
The oracles of God are given to Israel for the world, 
and not for Israel alone. In the matter of the Law 
Paul seems to have moved some distance. At first he 
appears to have held a Jewish view that it was given 
by angels.1 His later epistles suggest that he was 
occupied with other themes, when once in Romans he 
had worked out his ideas upon the Law—greater 
themes, the place and work of Christ in all time and 
all existence. But in any case the Law was never 
going to be God’s last word; or why should He have 
sent His Son? Paul never loses his attachment to 
his people ; he hopes against hope that their acceptance 
of Christ will come in time, and prove “ life from the 
dead” 2—the consummation of the world and the 
resurrection itself. 

Lastly, the difficulty about the Gentiles is dissolved 
into thin air. All his early friendships and interests 
were right after all; Gamaliel’s interest in Greek 
literature was right; the theory, that had given Paul 
so much pain, was all a mistake; God loved the 
Gentile as He did the Jew, and Paul could find room 
for his own heart to expand in God’s world of men. 

So much was clear at once, but the full value of 
it Paul was not to discover except with time. Many 
things had to be re-thought; and even the points 
mentioned are probably clearer and sharper-edged in 
our summary, with the rest of Paul’s life and his 
epistles before us, than they were at the moment to 
him. How he developed is plain to any one who will 
read his epistles in chronological order, how profoundly 
and how swiftly—and, not improbably, with an in- 

1 Gal. iii. 19. In Col. ii. 8, it is possible that Paul includes the 


Law, but also possible that he refers to heathen ideas only. 
a Rom. x17 15; 


DAMASCUS 71 


creasing rate of acceleration. It has been conjec- 
tured that the interval in Arabia, which he mentions 
to the Galatians,1 was largely given to reflexion, but 
that must remain a guess. By the time he wrote to 
the Galatians, his account of the great change in his 
life is drawn with edges sharp and clear enough. 
That is no uncommon phenomenon. Augustine’s 
Confessions describe a conversion completer and more 
abrupt than could be surmised from his writings of 
the period, and the question has been raised as to 
which give the truer picture 2—not a very profound 
question. ‘To the man looking back it is plain how 
great the change was, and that it was final and de- 
cisive ; to the man at the time its full meaning was 
not so evident, and (as we should expect of men like 
Augustine and Paul) he will not say more than he has 
realized, he will say probably a good deal less than he 
might—naturally and wisely. “I were but little 
happy, if I could say how much,” * and a man of any 
depth will often impress onlookers as taking great 
happiness or great changes, which may come suddenly, 
with a surprising coolness. Jesus himself hints some- 
thing of the kind in his parable of the seed and the 
soils; the seed in the good ground shows less for a 
while than the seed in the shallow earth, but no one 
in the long run can doubt that it was really sown. 
The great change comes in Augustine, and he is 
quieter about it than some readers of the Confessions 
would have expected; but he knew, and Paul knew, 
that it was a decisive moment ; how much in life was 
changed neither could at once know. 


1 Gal.i.17,18. Itmay meana total absence of about three years from 
Jerusalem. Luke and Paulare bothcarelessorabsent-minded about dates. 

2 J would refer my reader with pleasure to William Montgomery’s 
most interesting and attractive volume, St Augustine, Aspects of his 
Life and Thought, which gives a very human picture of the most 
charming of saints with unusual skill and sympathy, and with sound 
historical discernment. 


® Much Ado About Nothing, ii. 1, 318. 


Cyapter IV 


“NOT HAVING MINE OWN 
RIGHTEOUSNESS ” 


One of the great difficulties in the interpretation 
of religious experience is the unnoticed divergence 
of terminologies. Where the differences of race and 
thought are broad, some but not all students will be 
on the alert from the start, aware that there is no 
easy translation of terms round which the minds of 
men have long been at work. ‘There are traditions, 
suggestions, nuances, which make it impossible to be 
certain without close examination that we have 
caught the real meaning or exhausted the whole 
wealth of meanings. It is particularly difficult for a 
monotheist to understand polytheism, eminently so 
for a monotheist who comes at the end of a long age 
of dominant monotheism. God in English and theos 
in Greek have to be used as equivalents ; but are they ? 
Between them lie all that Hebrew and Christian have 
taught the world of God; and even in Plato the 
equivalence has to be scanned in every passage. It is 
hard, too, when men for eighteen centuries have been 
using Paul’s words, now importing into them un- 
consciously their own ideas derived from a later and 
perhaps another scheme of things, now consciously 
attempting to re-interpret, with or without a religious 
purpose of their own—it is very hard to be sure that 
the familiar word means precisely what we have been 
told or what we think we have discovered. Paul was 
a Jew, and most of his interpreters have inherited a 
culture and an outlook at least as much Greek, at 
least as much Latin, as it was ever Jewish. 
7 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 73 


It is easy to say that St Cyprian, a Roman lawyer 
of the third century, converted to Christ but not 
wholly transformed, still a Roman lawyer, very little 
influenced by Greek thought, ignorant of Hebrew, a 
man of parchment and pasteboard, is an ideally bad 
interpreter of Paul. Is itso easy to own that a modern 
scholar, a man of books and lexicons, who never knew 
at first hand the pagan world, never spoke with a 
heathen except in an educated dialect of some Western 
speech—a man whose tradition is Greek antiquity 
mediated by the inheritance of the Renaissance, the 
evolutional theories of modern science and some 
smattering of recent psychological spcculation—may 
be as far astray as Cyprian? When one reflects 
how partially one knows one’s own environment, 
how little one understands of things so obvious as 
the ‘Town Council’s duties (to say nothing of its politics) 
or the educational system of one’s own country as 
it bears on the education of actual children, 
how little one guesses of the economic c: religious 
ideas of the family across the road or of ti servant 
waiting at table, it is obvious that ancient 1.1 might 
be as ignorant of such things, and as inattentive to 
them. ‘The Mohammedan and the Hindu may know 
how to annoy each other and utterly fail to under- 
stand each other’s minds and why such and such 
things annoy. [Fundamental misconception is not 
the peculiar gift of the uneducated either, as English 
history teaches us. A great deal of the interpretation 
of Paul suffers from being archaeology applied without 
enough historical care. 

It is almost useless to try to understand a man on 
the basis of coincidences of his language with the 
language of others. Both may use the same term, 
and, so far from its implying unity of outlook, it may 
really mark their dissidence; all depends on connota- 
tion, and association, and still more on the central 
idea to which the term, and what it is meant to 


74 PAUL OF TARSUS 


convey, arerelated. When, then, we are told to look for 
Paul’s religious affinities in the contemporary mystery 
religions (if contemporary they were), or even in con- 
temporary Judaism, whatever the relations which we 
may find, Paul’s central ideas were not taken from 
the mystery religions and are not to be found in them, 
and the supreme and decisive factor in his life con- 
temporary Judaism rejected. A great man’s debt to 
his countrymen and his teachers may be underestimated 
by himself, it often will be; but it may be grossly 
overestimated by posterity. Plato, for instance—is 
he the product of Periclean democracy and Orphic 
religion? We can see how both affected him, but 
we have to take pains to see how independent he is 
of both, how very much more a man of all time than 
a man of that time. | 

Some similarity of experience is required in an 
interpreter. A student, modern to the core, who 
could not conceivably take initiation into any mysteries 
seriously, who is not supremely concerned with sin 
nor interested in Jesus Christ or immortality, may 
have contributions of value to make to the study of 
Paul, but he will need more than genius to be an 
interpreter of him. Luther remains a great inter- 
preter of Paul; for, whatever ought to be deducted 
because of sixteenth-century controversies and all the 
history, traditions, and politics that colour them, 
whatever must be modified by later-gained precision 
in scholarship, Luther has the same largeness and 
variety of mind as Paul, the same experience of failure 
in the struggle for righteousness, the same realization 
of a new life given by Christ; and these after all are 
the central and decisive things in Paul. John Wesley, 
a man of less range than Luther, touched the ex- 
perience of Paul and so far is a warrantable interpreter. 
Of many of Paul’s recent interpreters, admirable men, 
widely read in archaeology and comparative religion, 
something is to be said not unlike Bunyan’s criticism 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 75 


of the “ancient Christian”? at Bedford from whom 
he had such “cold comfort”: ‘Talking a little 
more with him, I found him, though a good man, a 
stranger to much combat with the Devil.” } 

There is, as Wendland says,? a unity in Paul’s 
fundamental thoughts, an inner connexion. Before 
Damascus he hated Jesus; after Damascus he loved 
him; but, before and after, he knew what sin was— 
from experience; and he knew, from what it meant 
to himself, that God could not compromise with it ; 
before and after, righteousness was his ideal, a matter 
of daily thought. 

Those who like contrasts are apt to draw one between 
“ the lucid free rational spirit ” * of the Greek and the 
Jewish conscience anxious and even morbid about sin. 
_ The contrast has its value, even if we recognize the 
rather casual recognition given to sin by the Rabbinic 
Jew, according to Mr Claude Montefiore,t and the 
serious account taken of it by Plato. The Jew was 
committed by the tradition of his people to the 
keeping of the Law; ‘‘for Judaism religion was the 
hallowing of this life by the fulfilment of its manifold 
duties.” 5 ‘There was the Law itself in the back- 
ground, never forgotten, with its picture of a jealous 
God insistent on righteousness to the utmost; there 
were the writers of wisdom-literature, moralists of a 
somewhat safe inspiration; above all there were the 
great prophets of Israel; and at last in their succession 
there was John the Baptist, though we cannot say that 


1 Grace Abounding, § 141. 

2 Wendland, Die hell.-rom. Kultur, p. 352. 

®R. W. Livingstone, The Greek Genius, p. 181; who emphasizes 
that Plato is not of the type commonly drawn of the Greek. 

* In his earlier book, see p. 35; but in the later work he qualifies 
what he had written. 

5 Fewish Encyclopaedia, s.o. Saul of Tarsus. Cf. also R. Travers 
Herford, The Pharisees, p. 58, “ to live for the Torah, 4y the Torah, 
and with the Torah was the ideal which Ezra cherished for the national 
life. 


76 PAUL OF TARSUS 


he influenced Paul; all these pointed the Jew one 
way and made a real contrast with Greek religion. 
There was incalculable gain in having a God whose 
moral standards were more and more recognizably 
ahead of the best men, rather than gods whose legends 
proclaimed them markedly below even average human 
beings. 

But the ordinary Jew, sketched by Mr Montefiore, 
devoted to his religion but easy-going about it, is not 
the type that we have to study. Paul was a Pharisee, 
as he avowed, and he took his religion seriously. It 
was essentially not unlike other religions where the 
acquisition of merit is the goal ; and in spite of modern 
attempts to make the Pharisees look better and brighter, 
the verdict of Jesus upon them stands, unless we are 
to say that, in religion unlike other spheres, the verdict 
of genius is less important than that of the common- 
place.t Even a religion of merit is an advance upon 
a religion of magic, but it is open to peculiar dangers. 
Fear is, after all, a primary motive both in religions 
of magic and of merit, and it is not the best motive ; 
it is fitful; it is easily dulled; and, even when most 
steady, it does not lead to real development of the 
mind and conscience; it over-developes certain sides 
of the character at the cost of the whole nature. The 
whole endeavour of a man intent upon merit was 
apt: to become self-centred. Luther, who knew from 
experience, remarks on the “ opinion of righteousness ” 
and its effects? There was a danger of legalism— 
that regard for the letter and contempt of the spirit 
which form together the great temptation of all 
lawyers. ‘“‘ Associate religion with law, and the latter 
will gain ground with the swiftness of an infectious 


1R. T. Herford, The Pharisees, pp. 204-211, severely rates 
Jesus for his ignorance of the Pharisee position, the unintelligence 
and want of sympathy that he showed, and the sharp temper betrayed 
in his language, though he admits some great qualities in Jesus. 


* Luther, Ga/atians (Engl. tr. 1584), fol. 152 b. 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 77 


disease.” 1 ‘* I fast twice in the week; I give tithes 
of all that I possess”? ;# and other references to the 
tithing of mint and anise and cummin will recur to 
the reader’s mind, and much else that men have 
quoted from Jewish legalism. ‘These are the dangers 
of small minds, and a legalistic outlook on religion 
seldom allows the mind to grow. Men of this build 
lose all sense of perspective; their attention is turned 
like schoolboys to the marks they have won, and 
they become impressed with their own achievement. 
Fixing their eyes on God’s Law they lose sight of 
God. 

But Paul had a mind of more energy; “his 
psychology,” as Mr Montefiore says, “is not ours. 
His doctrine of sin is not ours.” He is too deep and 
too real to be taken in by himself, as Jesus shows us 
that the Pharisees were apt to be. If he says that he 
had been by Pharisee standards ‘‘ blameless,” 4 it is 
when he has thrown them over for other standards 
and has ceased for ever to “‘ go about to establish his 
own righteousness.” 5 He has the habits of a psy- 
chologist, he is one by instinct and nature; he reads 
his own soul and the souls of other men. His treatment 
of food-taboos in his letter to the Corinthians deserves 
to be recalled oftener than it is. It is the judgment 
of a man supposed first to have been an adherent 
of Pharisaism and later on to have been influenced 
by the adherents of mystery religions; but he sees 
through the whole nonsense of prohibited foods, of 
religious vegetarianism and the perils of meat infected 
by idols. The passage should help us to measure 
the man, a mind not at all of the type that thinks in 


1Weinel, Paul (Engl. tr.), p. 69. 2 Luke xviii. 12. 

*R. T. Herford, The Pharisees, p. 231, “ Judaism in general, and 
Pharisaism in particular, was a religion which put the doing of God’s 
will in the first place, and faith in the second place; faith, moreover, 
not in a Person but in God Himself.” 


«Phil. iii. 6. 5 Rom. x. 3. 


78 PAUL OF TARSUS 


terms of magic, a nature that will never tolerate 
pettifogging conceptions of anything. He cannot be 
supposed to have imagined righteousness a matter 
of mint and anise and cummin. No, he struck for 
higher things ;_ he “‘ followed after the law of righteous- 
ness,” pitched his ideals high, high as the standards of 
God—and he failed to attain them. So much we 
saw, in considering his conversion. 

“Be not deceived,” he wrote later on to the 
Galatians,! “‘ God is not mocked;” and he used a 
rather colloquial term—a man does not “ screw up 
his nostrils”? at God with impunity. A Jew, Paul 
had not grown up for nothing in a community that 
spoke and wrote and thought perpetually upon a 
Last Judgment. If in one of his earliest extant 
Christian letters he speaks of the Lord Jesus being 
revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, and in 
flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not 
God,? the vocabulary and the phrase, if we eliminate 
the words “the Lord Jesus,” are clearly of Jewish 
origin; he identifies Jesus here with one familiar 
aspect of the Jewish Messiah. A similar adaptation 
by Jesus of a Jewish picture of the last day confirms 
this,? and establishes historically the sort of thing that 
haunted the mind of Paul in his Jewish days. A man, 
he says in a later and greater letter, may by hardness 
and impenitence lay up wrath for himself in the day 
of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment is revealed. 
God, as the old psalmist saw, renders to every man 
according to his deeds; and for those “ who do not 
obey the truth” (a very noticeable phrase, very 
suggestive of Paul’s outlook) there will be indignation, 
wrath, tribulation, and anguish, whether the man be 
Jew or Gentile; and it will come to the Jew first in 
fact. Perhaps Paul had once thought, “to the Jew 
afterwards,” but in any case he had never supposed 
the Jew would get off scot-free—“ there is no respect 

1 Gal, vi. 7. * 2 Thess: 1.57, 8.) pee p. 233.) 0: Mate 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 79 


of persons with God.” 1 Here is one more feature of 
the influence of monotheism in contrast with Greek 
polytheism and Greek monism ; the human individual 
has to do with a personal God, who attends to his 
case as if there were no other such case to occupy 
Him in the universe. Men commonly do not think 
in this way in modern times, nor with the strictness 
that Plato used in distinguishing between good and 
evil; and we pay the penalty of careless thinking and 
society suffers with us. ‘To recover the mind of Paul, 
this conception of God’s judgment, of God’s personal 
dealing with the individual sinner, of the reality of 
the punishment, must be grasped and understood—and 
imagined, too. ‘The modern thinker supposes himself 
less apt to confuse picture and substance; he need 
not suppose himself more sensitive than Paul to the 
reality here. 

For, that Paul does not merely look to the future, 
the seventh chapter of Romans amply proves with its 
dreadful description of the losing battle with the 
flesh. Paul stands near those ancient thinkers, who, 
from Plato onward, found matter the source of evil 
and antagonistic to soul—matter phenomenal, tran- 
sient, and mortal, working against the eternal and real 
element, the body the prison of the soul. Paul’s 
term is “the flesh,” and a reference to the Greek 
concordance under oap€ will quickly reveal the line 
his thoughts of it took. No flesh shall be justified— 
the weakness of your flesh—when you were in the 
flesh—in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good— 
with the flesh I serve the law of sin—they that are in 
the flesh think the things of the flesh, they cannot 
please God—the fleshly mind is enmity against God ; 
such is a handful of his phrases, taken from the Epistle 
to the Romans. Elsewhere, if we may take the Epistle 
to the Ephesians as representing his mind (as I believe, 
whoever may have been his secretary, and however 

1 Rom. ll. 5-11. 


80 PAUL OF TARSUS 


freely the secretary treated this letter and the letter 
to the Colossians), Paul goes further and says: ‘We 
wrestle not against flesh and blood ”—not, we may 
be sure, a reversal of his view in the Epistle to the 
Romans—‘“ but against principalities, against powers, 
against the rulers of this world’s darkness, against 
spiritual wickedness in high places,” in fact, the whole 
daemon world. In the struggle the will is divided 
and betrays him, as Augustine in his turn found; he 
can will but not do; the flesh has control of the will 
or some part of it, and paralyses it. ‘The “ thought ” 
of the flesh, the “ desires”? of the flesh, infest the 
will; and as a Christian Paul prays for “ the keeping 
of the thoughts,” no idle prayer.t. It should be noted 
at this point, as Professor Percy Gardner observes, 
that Paul does not accuse himself of the vices of the 
Greeks, of actual unchastity in any of its many forms. 
But what went on in his mind was enough to make 
him feel himself alienated from God, and to make 
him own that this alienation was deserved. 

When we consider the effects of sin as Paul knew 
them, it is interesting that we are able to compare 
with his writings a work, written probably in Hebrew 
and in his own day, an orthodox work which is fairly 
representative, we are told, of the Judaism against 
which Paul re-acted—the Apocalypse of Baruch.? 
Others had held that sin began with the angels 
that fell; this author, like Paul, lays it at Adam’s 
door, and finds its consequences in physical death, 
psychological and physical decline and spiritual evil, 
for men and for angels. ‘‘ Owing to his transgression 
untimely death came into being, and grief was named, 
and anguish was prepared, and pain was created, and 
trouble perfected, and disease began to be established, 
and Sheol to demand that it should be renewed in 
blood, and the passion of parents produced, and the 


1 Phil. iv. 7. See p. 189. 
*R. H. Charles, Apocrypha and Pseudonyma, ii. 470. 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 81 


greatness of humanity was humiliated, and goodness 
languished. What, therefore, can be blacker or darker 
than these things? ... For he was a danger to 
his own soul; even to the angels was he a danger. 
For, moreover, at that time when he was created, they 
enjoyed liberty. And some of them descended, and 
mingled with women. And then those who did were 
tormented in chains.”1 There is more than a hint 
of rhetoric in this, but not without genuine thought. 
Yet “though Adam first sinned and brought untimely 
death upon all, yet of those who were born from him 
each one of them has prepared for his own soul torment 
to come, and again each one of them has chosen for 
himself glories to come. . . . Adam is therefore not 
the cause, save only of his own soul, but each one of us 
has been the Adam of his own soul.” 2? As to the Law, 
“man would not rightly have understood My judg- 
ment, if he had not accepted the Law, and if his fear 
had not been rooted in understanding.” * ‘The writer 
is emphatic upon the value of good works: ‘* Hezekiah 
trusted in his works and had hope in his righteousness, 
and spake with the Mighty One . . . and the Mighty 
One heard him” (lxiii. 3, 5); “‘ those who have been 
saved by their works, and to whom the law has been 
now a hope, and understanding an expectation, and 
wisdom a confidence, to them wonders will appear in 
their time. For they will behold the world which 
is now invisible to them, and they will behold time 
which is now hidden from them. And time shall no 
longer age them. For in the heights of that world 
shall they dwell, and they shall be made like unto the 
angels, and be made equal to the stars, and they shall 
be changed into every form they desire, from beauty 
into loveliness, and from light into the splendour of 
glory” (li. 7-10); “the righteous justly hope for 
the end, and without fear depart from this habitation 

1 Apoc. Baruch, \vi. 6-12. 2 Apoc. Baruch, liv. 15, 19. 

8 Apoc. Baruch, xv. 5. 

Ly 


82 PAUL OF TARSUS 


because they have with Thee a store of works preserved 
in treasuries ” (xiv. 12); if others did evil, it was due 
to Zion, that on account of the works of those 
who wrought good works she should be forgiven 
(atv 7): 

Paul has some of these ideas; ‘by one man sin 
entered into the world and death by sin, and so death 
passed upon all men, for that all have sinned . . . b 
one man’s offence death reigned by one”;1 “ the 
wages of sin is death”?;? “the earnest expectation 
of the creation waits for the manifestation of the 
sons of God. For the creation was made subject to 
vanity . . . the bondage of corruption. . . . The 
whole creation groans and travails in pain until 
now.” ® He believes that, with sin, death and pain 
and anguish, grief and trouble, came and remain. He 
seems much less sure that each one of us is the Adam 
of his own soul; and, if anything like half of what 
modern speculators and observers have said of heredity 
is true, he is probably right in not holding that every 
child comes into the world equally a sheet of white 
paper with the option of remaining white. That had 
not been his experience; “sin came to life and I— 
died”? ;* it is not rhetoric, it is a record of tragic and 
bitter experience, Laconic, sufficient. ‘“‘O wretched 
man that lam! Who shall deliver me out of this body 
of death?” A German scholar® guesses that the 
word “I died ” is a memory of Paul’s first deep con- 
sciousness of sin and failure when a child, a memory 
of a youth darkened by the shadow of sin falling on a 
gifted nature, and growing intenser with years till it 
is distress and anxiety. We have seen already how it 
affected him when we studied his conversion. 


‘Rom.y. 126, * Rom. vi. 23. 

* Rom. viil. 19-223 it may be urged that Paul means travail- 
pains, as he says ovvwoiver dirth-pains and not death-pains in v. 22; 
but pain runs through the rest of the passage. 

‘Rom. vil. 9. ® Deissmann, Pau/, p. 94. 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 83 


Paul is not content with the one pungent phrase. 
The question of sin was not one to be turned off in a 
sentence. He recurs to it again and again. He con- 
trasts with “the new man” “the old man and his 
nature crumbling or wearing away along the lines of 
the desires that deceive,” ! the wasting of the moral 
nature by the passions, till a man is *‘ dead in trespasses 
and sins,” 2 a view very like that of the Stoics. In 
the Epistle to the Romans he writes out of his own 
autobiography, not only in the famous seventh chapter 
already quoted, but also in the first chapter. ‘The 
refrain runs through it “ God gave them up ”—first 
to uncleanness, next to vile affections, finally to a 
“reprobate mind,” a mind that refused to perform 
the functions of a mind without betraying its 
incapacity. For he speaks elsewhere of conscience 
cauterized (1 Tim. iv. 2), and stained (Titus i. 15),° 
the mind darkened (Eph. iv. 18), and stained (Titus 1. 
15), the heart deadened (Eph. iv. 18). He uses the 
analogy of senses lost, and he pictures the man himself 
left to be the victim of guides that lead astray, of 
scouts that do not report ; he suggests a nature robbed 
of its natural self-protection, a mind that (in the 
language of the old Greeks) is like a coin not genuine, 
or a citizen who cannot make good his claim to citizen- 
ship,s—a human soul at last without hope and without 
God in the cosmos,® the huge vast cosmos, empty it 
would seem of all that can make a man endure it 
and face it, if we may speak a little in Stoic style. A 
man is saved by hope, Paul holds ;* and if a man has 
no hope, no God, and no mind left to work his way 
with, what of him? And the author of the Apocalypse 
of Baruch spoke of storing up good deeds; and other 
Jews thought it would serve if they fulfilled the Law 


1 Eph. iv. 22. ? Eph. ii. 1. 

* That is if the Epistles to Timothy and Titus are Paul’s own, or 
Pauline. 

* dddKtpos. 5 Eph. ii. 12. * Rom. viii. 24. 


84 PAUL OF TARSUS 


as far as they were able, the best way they could; 
and with a nature like this ! 

A battle then against the flesh, against Sin (which 
in his language becomes personified), against princi- 
palities and powers of darkness—fears within and 
fightings without (if we may forestall a phrase of his 
Christian life 1)—and the man’s nature steadily growing 
less and less able to sustain the conflict, as conscience 
lost faculty after faculty, and the will was more and 
more divided—it is little wonder that Paul describes 
such a man as without hope. If we are saved by 
hope, to what does despair lead ? 

So much for the human side; and God? As we 
have seen, a man’s sense of sin corresponds with his 
sense of God, and is indeed made by it. ‘There 
were Jews, as Mr Montefiore tells us with a hint of 
satisfaction, who took sin, as one might say, sensibly ; 
but mankind rarely remembers with gratitude the 
contributions made to the world of ideas by whit is 
locally known as commonsense. ‘The uncommon man 
is more apt to be the real contributor, and Israel had 
produced a succession of them. Paul was a student 
of the prophets, who had spoken of God and of sin; 
and his experience confirmed theirs—up to a point. 
They were right as to the enormity of sin, as to the 
transcendent majesty and purity of God; there could 
be no compromise between God and man’s sin; but 
the prophets had not shown how the gulf was to be 
bridged. Jeremiah and Hosea had come nearest it ; 
Hosea had spoken of God’s love in an epoch-making 
way; Jeremiah, worn out with the folly and wicked- 
ness of Judah, and his own admitted and obvious 
futility, had forecast a time to come when God would 
make a new covenant with the house of Israel. This 
new covenant, he foresaw, would be on the basis of 
a changed human nature, in which the observance 
of God’s law would be a fundamental instinct, the 

12 Cor. vil. 5. 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 85 


natural outcome of all within. No one could say 
that this change in Jewish character had arrived. 
The writers of Eschatology write on the tacit assump- 
tion that it had not yet come; they have little hope 
that it could come in the existing order of things. 
They urge that there must be judgment and selection ; 
that God’s triumph is in the future, perhaps in the 
far future—if indeed any one could call it triumph, 
when the great mass of the human race, and perhaps 
a large proportion of Israel—God’s highest work, 
God’s personal choice—should be written off as final 
failure.t No, the chaos and breakdown of human 
nature, and of Jewish nature, was the more evident, 
the more earnestly a young Pharisee struggled to make 
anything of his own soul; the material gave way. 

Yet God and man, he felt, must somehow manage 
some adjustment, but not at all costs. To abate 
anything of the awful purity and majesty of God 
would be asking God to be less God; it was not to 
be thought of ; and, besides, if one did think of it, 
it would not be done; God would not and could 
not be less than He is; He is righteous, and there 
is an end of it. Tacitly the Jew accepted what 
the Greek thinker had reached—Righteousness is not 
susceptible of compromise by God or man; God 
cannot thinkably waive jot or tittle of absolute 
Righteousness. 

Paul, at first, like the Apocalyptists, was entangled 
in legalistic conceptions of God. If God is righteous, 
if righteousness is to prevail in God’s universe, 1t must 
be clear to everybody—sooner or later it will be 
definitely and finally clear—that God must pronounce 
a last word upon Sin; and that word would be spoken 
by retributive Justice. Modern scholars, Jewish and 
others, do not find in the Old Testament or other 

1 Cf. 4 Esdras viii. 14, “ If then with a light word thou shalt destroy 


him who with such infinite labour has been fashioned by thy command, 
to what purpose was he made?” See also chap. x, pp. 239, 240. 


86 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Jewish literature the principle that God’s right to 
forgive is limited by His retributive justice, that God 
cannot forgive without some satisfaction or propitia- 
tion, adequate to the offence! They may be right 
in their contention that there is no Jewish antecedent ; 
there is however in Plato a parallel very close—God is 
not to be won over, says Plato, by prayers or sacrifices 
to palliate wrong.? Hindu thinkers, I do not know 
at what period, have reached substantially the same 
view, expressed in their central doctiine of Karma. 
But neither Plato, nor Paul, is to be supposed limited 
to the opaque views of his predecessors. So long as 
a man thinks in a legalistic way at all, he must think 
things through on the basis on which he starts, if he 
is to be clear at all. God may, as it is urged, have 
temporarily deferred sentence, He may have shown 
forbearance in passing over sin done aforetime ;* but 
deferred sentence is not necessarily cancelled sentence 
or abolished law. ‘The picture, which Mr Montefiore 
drew of the God of the Rabbinistic Jew, shows weakened 
lines, and implies principle lost; it is a loose-hung 
God, the very type that Plato hated and despised. 
The painful conception which Paul held of God is 
preferable to the notion that God administers His 
laws slackly, will accept easy equivalents, and will 
allow an off-and-on working of law in His universe. 
What the Judgment achieves in the scheme of 
thought reached by Paul is really revelation and 
vindication of the fundamental nature of God. In 
any well-ordered system or universe the punishment 
will correspond with the crime, or it is irrational ; 
and by its correspondence it shows and proves the 
real nature of the sin as conceived by the legislator. 


1See William Morgan, Religion and Theology of St Paul, 
pp. 87-90; though the treatment in my text owes more to the con- 
versation of Principal David S. Cairns, of Aberdeen. 

2 See generally Plato, Repud/ic, ii. 364, 365; Laws, x. 885. 

? Rom. ili. 25. 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 87 


Whether the system be a human one and the legislator 
human, or the system be the universe and the legis- 
lator God, the same principle holds. ‘The punishment 
exhibits the nature of the sin, and it reveals the mind 
of the legislator; it shows how he stands to the 
question of right and wrong. In the case of a Draco 
or the Roman Twelve Tables, the penalties will 
betray local and racial notions. But in a higher law, 
in the highest of all, the study of the penalties for 
sin will reveal God’s character. His uncompromising 
condemnation of sin in His universe, and the punish- 
ment assigned to it, serve also to exhibit the real 
outlines and characters of right and wrong—a funda- 
mental contribution to the idea of Cosmos, without 
which a universe cannot be ;—and they further serve 
to exhibit the character and attitude of God, to 
vindicate Him from any complicity with sin or with 
compromise.} 

Paul, to secure the character of God, must either 
supply a righteousness of his own answering to the 
requirements of the Law—for in all this, there is 
inevitably some confusion of the idea of law and the 
Law or Yorah given by angels through Moses; Paul 
equates them—or else Paul must admit (and he does 
admit with a fervour that people who think chiefly 
of their own skins will never understand) that he 
himself has failed and is amenable, and must be, to 
the punishment assigned by God to a failure such as 
he has achieved. ‘To compromise or to palliate is 
to derogate from the conception of God; and that 
Paul is too honest and too God-centred to do, even 
if his honesty makes him despair. 

But Paul changed his mind in view of a great dis- 
covery. He could not give up, and did not, the 
fundamental conviction of God’s supreme righteous- 
ness—‘‘ let God be true and every man a liar.’ 
But he discovered in the Cross of Christ a moral and 

* Cf. Rom. ili. §. * Rom. ill. 4. 


88 PAUL OF TARSUS 


spiritual more-than-equivalent for the Judgment. 
The Cross did something, and did it so thoroughly, 
that it made men’s existing conceptions of God’s 
judgment seem antiquated. It took at once that 
central place in history, in human outlook, in the 
universe, which had been held by the Great White 
Throne. It solved the problem of God’s righteous- 
ness and man’s sin. The problem was to square 
moral instincts with grace. Greek and Jewish notions 
of God’s forgiveness failed, as Plato and others saw, 
because they involved the simple giving-away of the 
very ideas of law, order and righteousness, and because 
moreover this giving-away of what is fundamental 
appeared arbitrary, unbalanced, and a great deal too 
easy; it undid the universe, and yet cost nobody 
anything. One thing that the conception of Judgment 
carried with it was the idea of the moral and spiritual 
cost of sin ; no man (let us say) expecting to be damned, 
with the completeness and finality that the word 
carries whatever picture we frame of the state produced, 
could conceivably think lightly of sin. Nor, Paul 
held, could a man think lightly of sin, when he saw 
and realized the Cross of Christ. ‘The Cross enabled 
a man to share God’s view of the seriousness of sin, 
but without despair ; it allowed him to hope, to trust, 
to live, without cheapening God or righteousness. 
Repentance, perdvora, was not the rather easy Jewish 
process of the Day of Atonement, but a genuine 
sharing of God’s outlook at all costs to oneself, a 
disinterested emotion as opposed to one sprung of 
self-seeking, an affirmation of God’s ways. ‘The Cross 
was for Paul a revelation of God’s ways and of God’s 
nature, so surprising in its inconceivable generosity 
that it melted his heart, and that, throughout his 
whole life, he could never think or speak of it without 
the element of wonder and surprise. ‘‘ God was in 
Christ reconciling the world to Himself; ” in the Cross 
He showed Himself, His heart, and His love; and 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 89 


doing so He captured the self, the heart and the love 
of men, who thereupon came over to His view of sin 
and of everything else. ‘The Cross revealed at once 
the brightness and warmth of God’s love and the 
horribleness of sin; and if a man accepted the love 
of God as a result, he could not forget how exceedingly 
sinful sin had been shown to be. A service done for 
him by God in Christ, at the price of so much suffering 
and humiliation—made a spectacle for men and 
daemons and angels—a forgiveness that cost God so 
much, could never leave a man capable of thinking 
lightly of sin. Christ was indeed putting away sin 
by the sacrifice of Himself; and for all time sin, the 
record of the broken law, remained “ nailed to His 
Cross,” as Paul says.t The Cross shows them both 
nailed up, Christ and sin, a “ placarding ” 2 at once 
of the two supreme factors in a moral universe, God’s 
love and sin’s hatefulness. No wonder that for Paul 
there was no getting away from the Cross, no tran- 
scending of it (as in some partially derivative faiths) 
for a higher view of God; there was no higher view of 
God for him, because there was no truer or more 
essential revelation of God. God became unthinkable 
for Paul except as revealed in Christ; and so, if we 
are thoroughly and profoundly honest, He remains. 
No one would expect in so brief a compass a full 
statement of Paul’s conception of God in Christ. 
Indeed, as suggested before, if every chapter, if every 
line, is not full of what Paul is trying to express and 
trying to discover, the biography, or the characteriza- 
tion of the man, or whatever it be, is futile, and even 
false. “To me,” he said, “to live is Christ;” and, 
of course, it was; and as one is never done with life, 
Paul was never done with Christ—he would probably 
say he had hardly begun. Even a very little reading 
of his epistles in the order of their composition will 
show how amazingly he grew in his insight into Christ, 
1 Col, i..14. «Gal. mT. 


90 PAUL OF TARSUS 


how progressively he found more and more in him. 
It was said in our introduction that a man of this type 
is irreducible to system, and it is true. His vocabulary 
is not in the least that of a lawyer or even of a philo- 
sopher of the systematic type. He flings out words 
and thoughts almost in desperation. Perhaps the best 
commentary upon them and upon his methods is 
given by Clement of Alexandria, when he speaks of 
Christian language as to God: “‘ If we ever name Him 
calling Him, though not properly, one, or the good, 
or mind, or absolute being, or Father, or God, or 
Demiurge, we do not so speak as putting forward His 
name; but for want of His name, we use beautiful 
names, that the mind may not wander at large, but 
may rest on these. None of these names, taken singly, 
informs us of God; but, collectively and taken all 
together, they point to His almighty power.”? It 
was so that Jesus used parables, none of them telling 
the whole story, none of them susceptible of being 
pressed in minute detail, but all taken together giving 
a wonderful picture of God. So Paul’s metaphors, 
analogies, legalistic arguments, spiritual flashes—who 
can correlate them, who would wish to? Not Paul 
himself, a thinker too vivid, too human, too great, 
to be systematic. A system of Pauline thought will 
always be wrong somewhere; what the student of 
Paul has to do is to realize by experience, somehow, what 
that love of Christ, revealed in the Cross, and far above 
all law (for it transforms law into instinct), meant to 
Paul. Otherwise do not let him give the name of 
Paul to what he draws. 

“If any man be in Christ, it is a new creation,” says 
Paul: and the latter phrase seems to have been one 
that appealed to him, as it comes twice in letters several 
years apart. It is his equivalent for what the fourth 
evangelist later on calls being “‘ born again,” and, I 
think, a good deal more. It is not only that the man 

1 See Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, v. 81, 5-82, 3. 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 91 


is given hope to face the world with, in the place of 
despair; the whole world seems changed, a different 
place, and so it is, for there is a new God over it and 
in it, a loving friend and not a supernatural lawyer. 
Deissmann has reckoned that Paul uses the phrase 
“in Christ” a hundred and sixty-four times, perhaps 
with the rendering “in God” of the Septuagint 
Psalter before him.1 A new universe and himself 
in Christ—and that old and painful righteousness, 
“ according to the law blameless,”’ which he had striven 
so hard to acquire, is absolutely irrelevant ; he is in a 
new order of ideas. The acquired righteousness— 
and most of us know the consciousness of doing well— 
he counts not a gain but a loss, he prefers not to be 
conscious of it, mot to be aware of any accumulation 
stored in the treasury of God, but to have only 
such title to righteousness as Christ may give him, a 
righteousness of faith. In plainer words, what that 
old righteousness was supposed to secure, viz., happy 
relations with God, God is now known to volunteer 
on His part to those who will believe that He does so, 
and will accept what He offers. The righteousness 
which thus rests on faith, on counting God as good as 
His promise, is not from one point of view righteous- 
ness at all; but it serves as well, it is the acceptance 
for nothing of what had previously had to be bought. 
On the other hand it works out at a far more effective 
righteousness, for it is not self-seeking nor self-sus- 
tained; self is absent from it, and it is instinctive, 
the natural and spontaneous reaction of affection 
to affection; the good that is done is done without 
conscious purpose but to please a friend; it would 
be done in truth as readily out of gratitude, if that 
friend by any chance were never to know. 

One or two points must be safeguarded. The 
language of Paul is, as we saw, various. Like other 
men of vivid mind, he gives a thought many expressions. 

1 Deissmann, S¢ Pau/ (Engl. tr.), pp. 121, 132, etc. Cf. p. 212. 


92 PAUL OF TARSUS 


But he never suggests that God has to be reconciled 
or appeased—on the contrary, it is men who have to 
be reconciled to Him, like the wife (in the Corinthian 
letter 1), who gives up her quarrel with her husband. 
God is not asking for suffering. He volunteers to do 
the suffering Himself, God in Christ “‘ commending ” 
His love to us, sinners as we are. A great deal of 
trouble has been made for people who belong to a 
scientific or psychological age rather than to an age 
of legalism, by the phrase “ imputed righteousness ” ; 
but it is hardly of the first importance. All schemes 
of salvation, in which this idea plays a prominent 
part, have a legalistic basis and imply an outlook, and 
not that most closely congenial to the love of God; 
and “‘ the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our 
Lord,” is the central thing with Paul. If he touches 
the legal, as he does, it is fairer to take his words 
as an argument on the old assumption (which he has 
discarded) rather than on the new, which becomes 
the principle of his life. His relations with God and 
Christ are quite obviously beyond expression in legal 
terms. ‘The form, which a new experience takes, still 
more that in which it is expressed, depends a good 
deal on literary antecedents, on existing religious 
vocabulary, on philosophical postulates and dogmata, 
and indeed on those who are to listen or toread. ‘The 
great contribution of Paul here is his gift of a new 
language, in which Christians have continued ever 
since to express their deepest emotions. ‘The whole 
vocabulary of Grace is Paul’s; and, as one of his 
English followers put it, ‘tis a charming sound.” 
Paul will not be understood, if we try to work out 
his new life in terms of the old idea which he abandoned. 
But a new realization of him, and indeed of Christ, 
will be gained with every fresh attempt to collect and 
to understand the multitudinous variants, in which 
he tries to express the new life. He is not playing 
21 Cor, vil. If. 


NOT HAVING MINE OWN RIGHTEOUSNESS 93 


with formulae here; he is as little scholastic as a young 
lover; and experience lies behind every endeavour 
he makes to say how much he owes. Far nearer his 
feeling, far nearer the fact, than any juristic analogy, 
is his confession that “‘ God has shined in our hearts, 
to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God in the face of Jesus Christ.” 1 He has passed for 
ever from the region of schemes and satisfactions and 
settlements into that of sunshine and peace—a peace 
that passes understanding, as he says.2. Sunshine and 
peace are the conditions of spiritual growth. Storm 
and stress may challenge men and so develop them, 
but only if the challenge to find a deeper peace is 
stoutly accepted, and if the peace is found. Paul 
had accepted the challenge offered to his dogmatism 
by the Christian movement. He had faced the facts, 
above all the fact of the crucified Jesus; he had pene- 
trated to the meaning; he has won through to 
certainty and found God. 


12 Cor. iv. 6. * Phil. iv. 7. 


Cuapter V 
THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 


As characteristic a sentence of Paul as any we have 
in his own writings or in Luke, is one in his speech to 
the King and the Roman governor. ‘ Whereupon, 
O King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly 
vision.” 1 ‘* When it pleased God .. . to reveal his 
Son in me that I might preach the good news of him 
among the Gentiles, immediately I conferred not with 
flesh and blood ;”’ 2 so he writes to the Galatians. A 
century and a half later, Tertullian describes conver- 
version no less decisive: ‘‘ Who is not stirred by the 
contemplation of it [i.e., the death of the martyrs] 
to find out what there is in the thing within?” 
“Every man who witnesses this great endurance, is 
struck with some misgiving and is set on fire to look 
into it, to find what is its cause; and when he has 
learnt the truth, he instantly follows it himself as 
well.”* Et ipse statim sequitur. In both cases a 
martyrdom is a part-cause. ‘To look with open face 
into the glory of the Lord (i.e., Jesus), as on to a mirror 
on which the sun is shining, is to be lit up oneself, to 
be transformed.5 

Why, we are asked, does Damascus mean to him 
a new vocation? Why does the vision of Jehovah 
enthroned, high and lifted up, while His glory filled 
the temple, mean first a new sense of sin to Isaiah, 
and then a call to go on behalf of God, where God 
shall send him? Why is Jeremiah, if reluctantly, 
still irresistibly a prophet ? Why has Amos to leave 

* Acts xxvi.19. * Gal. i. 15, 16. * Tertullian, 4po/., 50. 

* Tertullian, ad Scapulam, 5. 5 2 Cor. ili. 18. 

94 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 95 
his flock in the South ? Why must Buddha share his 


illumination? The instances might be multiplied to 
great length. Why can a man see Truth and not be 
able to leave it alone? “A man who can hold his 
tongue can hold anything,” wrote the wittiest church- 
man of our day; but in philosophy, and poetry, and 
religion, to see is to speak. ‘There is no alternative. 
“Tf I do this thing against my will, a stewardship 
is committed to me;” 1! but Paul did not do it 
against his will, and by now he could act with an 
undivided will. He instantly realizes what is involved. 
All that has been pent up in him, all the instincts 
crushed by his resolve to be a thoroughgoing Pharisee, 
everything—love of men, Gentile memories, the 
craving for the largest-hearted God possible — is 
released at once and joyful. John Bunyan says that 
he himself under somewhat similar circumstances 
felt as if he could talk about the love of God to the 
crows by the roadside, and legend (or perhaps history) 
says that Francis of Assisi did. Paul and Bunyan had 
other game. 

A man is responsible to men for what he knows, 
and responsible to God for telling them in full. Much 
folly is talked to-day about the emphasis laid on 
personal salvation, on individual conversion. So far 
as we can learn from our records, it has been God’s 
most effective way of saving communities; and the 
saved man knows it and gets to work; and Paul did. 
Without hedging or accommodating, outspoken and 
definite from the first, he let it be known where 
he stood—“ first unto them of Damascus, and at 
Jerusalem” and then in Tarsus,? and so on into 
widening circles, in “ regions beyond,” ® “ not where 


My Cor. ix. 17. 

2 Cf. Acts ix. 30; xi. 25. ‘These two references suggest (alas! 
as too often in Luke, without dates) a ministry of some duration in 
the native place which must have been interesting. 


3 2 Cor. x. 16. 


96 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Christ was named.”?! And, like real converts, like 
men who make the supreme discoveries, he is prepared 
to proclaim his message at all costs to himself. 

For Paul Jesus is “ Lord”; it is the name for 
Jesus that is peculiarly and pre-eminently Paul’s own. 
If we are told that this was the name given by Greek 
adepts to Serapis, Paul at all events knew more of 
Jewish religion than he ever did of Egyptian *—so 
much is certain; and he had met the term in the 
Septuagint, a book with which we know him to have 
been. familiar.* ‘Io this end,” he says* Ohmiar 
both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be 
Lord both of the dead and of the living.” Christ’s 
lordship is proportionate to his own place and person; 
and as Paul knows more of Jesus Christ every year, the 
lordship of Christ is enhanced and emphasized. If 
Paul escaped from the servitude of the law of Moses, 
with a relief that never died away, he passed under the 
law of Christ. He says it with a sudden jerk, partly to 
explain himself to others, partly in happy reminder to 
himself.6 A man, writes Professor F. G. Peabody, “ is 
set free as he passes from one kind of law to the other. 
Liberty is allegiance to the higher law”; there are 
“laws that broaden and enlarge life.’* He has a 
centre now—not one that he is secretly in revolt 
against, but one to which all life is true’d; and it 
means a steadying of interests, a correction of ideals, 
an expansion of outlooks—the experience which 


Wordsworth describes in the Ode to Duty: 


I supplicate for thy control, 
But in the quietness of thought ; 


1 Rom, xv. 20. 

2 Once more note the slightness of Paul’s connexion with anything 
Egyptian, Apollos included. 

*Compare Rom. xiv. 11; Phil. ii. ro, with Isaiah xlv. 23, 
Septuagint. 

‘Rom. xiv. 9. 5: Cor. 1r2ai 

* Afternoons in the College Chapel, p. 72. 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 97 


Me this unchartered freedom tires ; 

I feel the weight of chance desires : 

My hopes no more must change their name, 
I long for a repose that ever is the same. 


Paul, too, as we have seen in a passage previously 
quoted, feels the need of having his ‘‘ thoughts kept ” ; } 
but with him the centre is not the conception of duty, 
but the living person who (as he repeats) “ loved me 
and gave himself for me.” 2 If there is truth (as there 
is) in the old saying, fabri fabricando fimus, a truth 
expressed in English by apprenticeship, what was it 
for Paul for years to be “‘ a fellow-worker with Christ,” 8 
hammering the same anvil, handling the same things, 
and learning how? ‘To live with an artist and to watch 
his touch, to catch his angle of vision, to learn at last 
to anticipate how his mind will work, is a supreme 
opportunity for any man who has an eye for greatness 
and truth. In no fanciful way, but literally, we may 
say that Paul lived so with Christ ; at least, it was his 
ideal, and the combination of such an ideal with 
personal love and gratitude is an incomparable train- 
ing. ‘There is illumination in the contrast between 
Marcus Aurelius, with his inheritance of Stoic dogmata, 
his sense of duty in a loyalty to an impersonal ideal, 
his solitude and his deepening belief in the ultimate 
futility of his endeavours, and Paul, happy in daily 
intercourse with a personal Master and convinced to 
overflowing that there can be no doubt of that Master’s 
triumph. 

The converse of Master in that ancient world was 
Slave, and the term is constantly applied to himself by 
Paul. An attempt has been made to use the Pauline 
phrase “‘ slave of Christ ” as evidence for some intimate 
knowledge of the mystery religions on Paul’s part.4 
Apuleius represents Isis as saying to the converted 

1 Phil. iv. 7. 2 Gal. il. 20. eo Corgi 


* Reitzenstein, Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, pp. 78, 
81, etc. 


G 


98 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Lucius, “ You will remember clearly and keep laid up 
in your inmost mind that the remaining course of 
your life to the very end of your last breath is 
mortgaged to me.” 1! He says further that against 
“‘ those, whose lives the majesty of our goddess has 
claimed for her service (servitium), unhappy chance 
has no opportunity.” * The initiate of Isis is fre- 
quently called in Greek “ slave of the goddess” (or, 
vaguely, “slave of god”). But Apuleius lived a 
century after Paul, so perhaps Paul did not borrow 
from him; and while Paul might have borrowed 
perhaps from those whose views Apuleius reproduced, 
it is not certain that he knew them, while it is certain 
that he knew another great branch of the human 
race and another and greater literature, where such 
expressions were not unfamiliar. Names like Obadiah, 
Abdiel, Obed-edom, Abdullah, Abdur Rahman, are 
reminders enough that the idea of a man being the slave 
of a god has been all along common to the Semitic 
race. Even if Paul was ignorant of the elements of 
Hebrew etymology—and there is nothing the least 
abstruse in the formation of such names—he could read 
the Psalter in Greek, and in the 116th Psalm, were the 
words: “O Lord, I am thy slave, I am thy slave, and 
the son of thy handmaid.” ‘The very words became 
Pauline; for ‘‘ Lord” the Septuagint gives xvpuos, 
and “slave” is represented by the ordinary Greek 
dovros. It is hardly necessary to send a modern 
Christian to the Upanishads—though he might have 
a better chance of finding them than Paul the docu- 
ments of the mystery cults—for what he can read in 
his Authorized Version. Mr Farnell at all events is 
satisfied that “‘ the slave of God ” came into Christian 
use from Semitic sources. 

Mr Farnell also gives us a suggestion as to another 
famous expression of Paul’s—‘‘ I bear in my body the 

1 Apuleius, Metam., xi. 6. 2 Metam., xi. 15. 
* Farnell, Greece and Babylon, p. 193. 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 99 


stigmata of the Lord Jesus.” 1 A passage is cited from 
Herodotus to show that a slave in Egypt may secure 
virtual emancipation by going to a certain temple of 
Herakles and having branded upon him “ certain sacred 
marks ” ? (oriypara ipa), though we are told that no 
Egyptian parallel has been found for such a general 
right of asylum. Mr Farnell says that the practice of 
marking the body by branding, cutting or tattooing, 
with some sign that consecrated the man as a slave of a 
deity, may have been of great antiquity, though the 
evidence only goes back to the sixth century B.c., but 
that it is essentially not Hellenic. Paul, once more, 
had nothing to do with Egypt; most probably he 
had not read a line of Herodotus. But the branded 
slave of men was no uncommon sight, and Paul is 
probably merely extending his general conception of 
the slave—not an unnatural thing to do, as he looked 
at his body and saw the scars, records of stripes and 
stones,* and of that “‘ dying of the Lord Jesus ” which 
he carried about in his person;® his body had had a 
good deal of “‘ buffeting.” ° 

Paul uses the illustration taken from slavery very 
freely, and it is worth while to note that so did Jesus. 
‘Necessity is laid upon me” (1 Cor. ix. 16); “I 
enslaved myself to all men that I might gain the more ” 
(1 Cor. ix. 19)—such passages are plain enough. He 
speaks of his apostolate as a stewardship, and the Greek 
oixovopos like the Latin villicus was a slave. Even 
thoughts are brought into obedience (2 Cor.x.5). The 
heading of several epistles tells the same tale ; and the 
idea is further extended when he speaks of “ ourselves 
your slaves because of Jesus” (2 Cor. iv. 5). ‘This 


+Gal. vi. 17. 

2 Herodotus, ii. 113; and note of How and Wells. 

3 Farnell, Greece and Babylon, p. 194. | 

«Cf. 2 Cor. xi. 24-27. 5 2 Cor. iv. ro. 

®1 Cor. ix. 27; wtrwridfw in this passage is another reminder 
of Greek boxing, a vivid one, much vivider than the English. 


100 PAUL OF TARSUS 


definite and clear relation to Christ, his own complete 
subjection, is often an immense relief to him. Men 
criticized him and his gospel; it was foolishness, the 
resurrection was silly, the cross a great obstacle. Well, 
if they did criticize him? “Who art thou that 
judgest (dost criticize) another man’s servant?” he 
asks; “‘’To his own master he stands or falls”; and 
then, in his sudden way, with the familiar tangent he 
adds, ‘* Yes, and he shall be upheld, too.” 1 So, in the 
passage of Galatians, the stigmata are indeed a badge of 
freedom; ‘henceforth let no man trouble me; I 
bear in my body the stigmata of the Lord (i.e., pro- 
prietor) Jesus.” Man’s judgment—even Corinthian 
opinion—is a negligible factor ;2 even his opinion of 
himself, as he points out, is unimportant ; indeed, he 
does not trouble to estimate himself and his services ; 
he is a steward, and “‘ he that estimates me is the Lord.” 
So there it rests. In his use of the term “ saint,” or 
dedicated person, we find implied very much the same 
ideas 3—Christ’s ownership and use of him, Christ’s 
responsibility for the message he delivers, Christ’s 
protection, his identification with his Master and the 
great joy of being used by Him. 

With something of the same thought, Paul tells the 
Galatians, ““I have been entrusted with the Gospel 
of the Gentile world” (ii. 7); and ‘it is asked of 
stewards that they should be faithful.” 4 Paul, with a 
message committed to him, is determined that it shall 
be delivered exactly. On this point he speaks with 
emphasis to the Corinthians in more than one letter. 
“Christ sent me to preach the gospel: not with 
wisdom of words . . . Christ crucified, unto the Jews 
a stumbling-block, and unto the Gentiles foolishness. 
. . . When I came to you, I came not with excellency 
of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testi- 
mony of God. For I determined not to know anything 

1 Rom. xiv. 4. See also p. 190. 2 ehdxiorov, I Cor. iv. 3. 

*Sce Fesus in the Experience of Men, chap. x. “1 Cor. iv. 2. 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE IOI 


among you save Jesus Christ—and him crucified... 
not with the enticing words of man’s wisdom... . 
The natural man receiveth not the things of the 
Spirit of God.” + In the other letter (we need not 
now try to discover how many letters, or parts of them, 
are embodied in our two Epistles) he speaks of his 
endeavour to be sincere. Sincerity is not so easy a 
task as some people think; it is not always easy to be 
sure that one is telling the truth, even if one tries, 
either to others, or to oneself; and simplicity is one 
of the most difficult things to achieve. But Paul, 
like many of his followers, and for the same reasons, 
has tried to be candid with himself, alike in self- 
criticism and in apprehension of the truth. His con- 
version had begun in self-criticism and the resolve to 
have ultimate fact in absolute veracity. 

Bunyan’s undertaking to be straightforward and 
plain in telling his story,? illustrates Paul’s mind— 
as an unintended parallel will. ‘I could also have 
stepped into a Stile much higher than this, in which I 
have here discoursed, and could have adorned all 
things more than here I have seemed to do; but I 
dare not: God did not play in tempting of me; 
neither did I play, when I sunk as into a bottomless 
Pit, when the Pangs of Hell caught hold upon me; 
wherefore I may not play in relating of them, but be 
plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was.” 

“We,” says Paul,? “have renounced the hidden 
things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor 
handling the word of God deceitfully ; but by mani- 
festation of the truth commending ourselves to every 
man’s conscience in the sight of God.” ‘The English 
of the Authorized Version is not here very clear in 
detail, nor is Paul’s Greek. At least two views may be 
taken of the first clause. It may be yet another 
emphasis on that thought, of which the epistle is full, 


St Corel, 17-li.. 14. 2 Preface to Grace Abounding. 
a (Or, iV. 2. 


102 PAUL OF TARSUS 


of the awful openness of the life of the Christian. 
“We have been made manifest to God,” he says— 
thrown open, seen through by God ; we must one day 
be thrown open and manifested before the Judgment 
Seat of Christ ; and we aim, he suggests, at being open 
and manifest to men here and now—‘ commending 
ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of 
God,” who knows our “‘ shameful secrets,” if we have 
any. He draws a picture of a life where all the windows 
of the soul are thrown open, where the sun searches 
every corner of the room.!' In this case—and whether 
it be Paul’s precise meaning in this passage or not, it 
is certainly his sense—he puts forward a plan of open- 
ness of life without secrets; if he, or any one else, is 
to serve Christ, he must be open for all men to see into 
him and to see through him; and if there is anything 
wrong, it seems better that men should know it at 
once, as they will later on “ when God judges the 
secrets of men.” ? 

On the other hand, Paul’s Greek may bear another 
meaning of “secret shame.”’ He was evidently con- 
scious in the Greek world of the criticism of those 
who had studied Rhetoric and Philosophy. ‘The 
passage already quoted from First Corinthians shows 
somuch. He, so sensitive to men’s feelings and minds, 
could not escape the unspoken criticism ; he read it, 
and felt it, at once—and, with it, he was conscious of a 
feeling of shame. He would have liked—something in 
him would have liked—“to step into a Stile much 
higher than this”; but he will not attempt it. He 
uses on the contrary, in this part of his epistle, three 
very striking words to bring out his endeavour “‘ to be 
plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was.’ 
“Not walking in trickery nor vamping the word of 
God,” he says here;* and, a chapter or so earlier,* 


1 Cf. verse 6. 2 Rom. il. 16. 
> 2 Cor. iv. 2, tavoupyia, Sodovpres, 
“2 Cor. il. 17, KarnAcvovres, 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 103 


he says he will not “try the tricks of a retail trader 
on the word of God.” ‘The Greek distinguished be- 
tween the merchant who travelled from city to city, 
and the retailer who sat in the market, as sorry a 
figure in person as he was in mind; “ the unsound 
kind of Chrématistiké (money-making) is so-called (76 
KamyAtKov), not because none but «dandou practised 
it, but because it was exemplified in, and best illus- 
trated by, their way of trading, with which every 
one was familiar,” says Mr W. L. Newman, com- 
menting on Aristotle. No man shall say that Paul 
has dressed up the Gospel, touched it up or toned it 
down, boomed it, or concealed the sacrifices it involves ; 
he has not attempted fine language or artful presenta- 
tion (though some said something of this sort *); he 
does not even try to put the thing in what might be 
supposed to be the right way. No; in the centre 
of the story were a stumbling-block and an absurdity ; 
and Paul is content to leave them there, with great 
plainness of speech and an open-air sincerity. Obedi- 
ence and loyalty on the one hand, and experience on 
the other, lie behind his procedure. The Cross of 
Christ fe to be faced and thought out; and, as Paul 
knew, the challenge of the Cross, the offence of the 
Cross, were potent agents in bringing men face to 
face with the supreme issue. 

In the sentence addressed to King Agrippa Paul 
brought vision and obedience close together, and we 
have already seen, in the analogy of the craftsman 
and the apprentice, how naturally the two things 
belong to each other. Obedience means vision. ‘The 
records of Luke, confirmed by passages of Paul’s own 
writing, tell of visions which Paul had from time to 
time, to which we have already referred *—visions, 


a Aristotle, Politics, i. 9, 2, 1257 B. * 2 Cor. xii. 16. 

Saar Mie 3.2 Cor. il. 17. 

Stamaniitsips OO. Cf. Acts. xxii. 18s) xvi. 7, 8,93! xvill. 9; 
XX. II; ert: aaa Lito lV eZ, + andi2 Gore xihka ie, 


104 PAUL OF TARSUS 


dreams, hints, ‘‘ concerns and stops,” as Quakers used 


to say. ‘To emphasize the mode, the form, the shape, 
in which these things from time to time came to 
Paul, would be to miss the real issue. Dreams, visions, 
and “‘ strong suggestions,’ come to temperaments of 
various makes, but are not necessarily particular 
revelations of God’s will, even if the recipients so 
suppose, nor need they be always as nugatory as some- 
times has been held. Examination is necessary both 
of the man and of contemporary ideas. Reitzenstein ? 
suggests that Paul perhaps had no peculiar Psychology 
of his own, but “speaks the Greek of his time.” 
Professor H. A. A. Kennedy,? whose acquaintance 
with Paul seems to be more intimate, says that 
practically every leading idea of Paul’s in these matters 
has its roots in Jewish soil. ‘The contradiction may 
not be very great. But the parallel of Socrates’ 
daimonion warns us to decide slowly. Whatever the 
form or shape of the supposed communication, when 
we survey Paul’s career, as when he surveyed it himself, 
it is hard to imagine a life more full of divine guidance 
in every field of thought and activity, a life in closer 
relation with God. ‘The Lord stood by him, he says, 
and put strength into him; and when we recall how 
many other men and women since Paul have had the 
same sense, and have lived with the same mastery over 
circumstance and accident, even the quickest thinker 
must pause a little before deciding it is all delusion or 
co-incidence—both rather loose terms. Co-incidences 
seem little apt to occur where minds do not quite 
co-incide. At the end, Paul says, ‘I know whom I 
have believed’”’;* and even if we dispute the com- 
plete authenticity of the Epistles to Timothy, that 


1 Die hell. Myst. Relig., p. 42, maintaining that zvedua in Paul’s 
writings has the same meaning as in the magical papyri. “‘ The same 
meaning ”’ is always a risky phrase, when genius is concerned. 

*H. A.A. Kennedy, Paul and Mystery Religions, p. 154 ff. 

* a Tim. iy, 17. ‘2 Tim. 3, 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 105 


sentence at least is confirmed and supported in every 
Epistle he wrote. Like the salutation,? it isin his own 
hand, the authentication of every letter; “so I 
write.” 

At another point we have to notice the so-called 
psychological or psychopathic manifestations which 
Paul mentions—that “ speaking with tongues ” which 
he perplexes us by avowing,?—the vision of the third 
heaven “ above fourteen years ago,” * which at least 
suggests a not excessive frequency of such occasions. 
For the present our task must be to study the evidence 
which Paul affords of spiritual guidance in a region 
where he and all sane men would count it of far 
higher import. Even the feeblest-minded person, who 
experiences voice and vision, whether we call him 
(or her) recipient or patient, will refer them to some 
theory with an intellectual basis, insecure it may be, 
but laid by reflexion not by revelation. ‘The vision 
is always classified, however mistakenly ; and the re- 
cipient or patient relies in the last resort on tests not 
of vision but of general experience. 

Popular Psychology to-day distinguishes between 
the once-born and the twice-born, with (I think) a 
temporary preference for the former—a preference 
which may have its origin in mental inertia. For the 
twice-born there is this to be said, that to have been 
“baptized with all experiences” opens a man’s eyes 
more than to have had one experience, however happy ; 
it stimulates reflexion and intellectual process, and it 
is more apt to result in action—in that propaganda 
which for real people is always illuminative. ‘The new 
life always means more to people who have grown up 
in the old and have escaped from it. ‘The psalmist’s 
experience is true— 


22 Thess. iti. 173; cf. 1 Cor. xvi. 213; Col. iv. 18. 

* 1 Cor. xiv. 18; cf. Chap. viii., p. 186. a SCOR SXH. Be 

“TI borrow this phrase, misquoted slightly, I believe, but a happy 
summary of what George Fox said or meant about himself. 


106 PAUL OF TARSUS 


He took me from a fearful pit, 
And from the miry clay, 

And on a rock He set my feet, 
Establishing my way. 


He put a new song in my mouth, 
Our God to magnify : 

Many shall see it, and shall fear, 
And on the Lord rely.} 


It is the new song that counts, from Homer down- 
wards, even if it is as old as Homer’s. 

The first point here is to notice once more the new 
peace of heart and mind that we have remarked already. 
Whatever vagaries manuscripts and their copyists may 
in certain passages suggest to timid editors, Paul 
avows the possession of peace with God.2, How much 
it means, no man can tell; and no man can know how 
much, unless he has been conscious of life without 
that peace. It passes understanding, as Paul said.® 
The striking passage in the central chapter of the 
Epistle to the Romans illustrates what Paul has in 
mind. ‘The spirit also helps our weakness, for we 
know not what we should pray for as we ought, but 
the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groan- 
ings that cannot be uttered. And he that searches 
hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit,” which 
(some verses earlier) cries in us ‘Abba, Father.” 
Luther hits the real meaning here, as a man of similar 
experience will; all that the man, or the Spirit in 
him, can manage is ‘‘ a little sound and a feeble groan- 
ing, as dh / Father,” and the Father understands 4—a 
simple vocative without petition, and connexion is 
established ; *‘ He knows about it all, He knows, He 
knows,” and the human heart is at peace. Such peace 
is, if we may use popular jargon, not static but dynamic. 


1 Psalm xl. * Rom: vsit. si Gl. p. 227. * Phill ivy 
“Luther on Galatians, Chap. IV. (fol. 192 a, of English transla- 
tion, second edition, 1580). 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 107 


“Peace,” wrote Benjamin Jowett, commenting on 
Paul, “‘ must go before moral growth as well as after ; 
there will be no growth while uneasy with God.” ? 

We have already noticed Paul’s description of what 
is found in Christ as a ‘‘ new creation.” ? He may 
mean by xrious the act of creating or the creation 
as it exists after being made. But whether a new- 
making or a new world, in it is a new man,®? a more 
explicit phrase, a man over whom sin no longer has 
dominion; he is escaped from its paralysing virus. 
He is finding, in the striking phrase of the Fourth 
Gospel (which was yet to be written) life, and life more 
overflowingly. In his own phrase, Paul knows now 
how the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus sets 
him free from the law of sin and death *—a spirit of 
power able to effect what the Law of Moses, and 
the whole apparatus of regulation, maxim, caution, 
and commandment, could never do.® Life is given by 
life, and by nothing else. ‘The parasite sin, as Professor 
Peabody has put it,® is killed by strengthening the 
organism on which it preyed; evil is overcome not 
negatively but positively, by good.? “As we have 
received mercy, we faint not,” Paul says,§ using the 
Greek word that suggests the cowardly slackening of 
energy rather than the involuntary fainting, to which 
the English term is now generally narrowed down. 
With good hope now within him, Paul can face any- 
thing and everything—all the wonderful discoveries of 
the spiritual life; for a new creation is not quickly 
exhausted or quickly realized. It is routine that 
deadens interest, and there his old legalism was weak ; 
he had everlastingly to be doing the same precautionary 

1 Jowett, Paul’s Epp., vol. ii., p. 266. $2 Coriva lhe 

* Eph. iv. 24, with the contrasting phrase in Rom. vi. 6. 

‘John x. 10; Rom. viii. 2. 

5 See P. Gardner, Religious Experience of St Paul, p. 34, 0n Paul’s 
sense of freedom in escaping from the minute regulations of the Law. 


® Evenings in the College Chapel, p. 173-4. 
7 Rom. xii. 21. 8 2 Cor. iv. I, ovK éyKakovpev, 


108 PAUL OF TARSUS 


things, and he was of too large a build, too original. 
He needed a positive centre, a stimulus, and a freedom ; 
and in Christ he found all these, and he loved Christ 
for the glorious freedom he found in Him, for the 
charter of adventure that Christ gave. 

At a later point we shall have to consider more 
closely the relations between Christ and the Spirit as 
Paul viewed them. Here we have to do with the new 
life, the life in the Spirit, a life of heightened indi- 
viduality resulting at once from the release from the 
old burden, and the freedom to develop the new rela- 
tion with God. ‘The spiritual man, Paul says, is subject 
to no man’s criticism ; he is out of their range; “no 
man can read what he is;”?? his life in a way is hid 
with Christ in God,? centred in the spiritual and in 
touch with the eternal. One of the effects of sin, as 
we saw, was to deaden mind and conscience—darken, 
stain, and cauterize, were Paul’s words. ‘The guidance 
and teaching of the Spirit—‘“‘ the Spirit of wisdom 
and revelation, in the knowledge of God” *—is to 
enlighten the understanding, to the point of realizing 
all that Christ means, to give a new faculty of intuition 
into spiritual things, restoring the lost powers and 
heightening them. God’s Spirit alone can be credited, 
he suggests, with knowing the things of God, which 
are only to be spiritually discerned; the man who 
has that Spirit will read them and “‘ compare ” them. 

The ‘“‘ depths of God,” in his startling phrase, are 
searched by the Spirit. Now the weakness of much 
popular religion, inside and outside the Christian 
Church, is the tacit assumption—never explicitly 
avowed, for the sense of reverence would forbid—that 
God is known, known already. The possession of 
some real knowledge of God is every man’s postulate 
in discussion; he assumes he knows God, and with 
a minimum of examination. The modern Christian 


11 Cor. ii. 143 Moffatt’s translation. 
* Col. iii. 3. * Eph. i, 17, 18. 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 109 


very often does not examine his concept of God and 
Misses its very composite nature; and his assumption 
results in endless confusion of mind. It is a real gain 
when we grasp that we do not know God, apart from 
the study of nature, which confessedly yields imperfect 
results, until we approach the subject through Jesus, 
whom we really know better than we know God. 
Paul had the advantage of being well aware that he 
had fundamentally misread God, of knowing that he 
had only begun to have any understanding of God 
at all, when he caught the meaning, the first meaning, 
of the Cross ; and yet he had been entirely sure of his 
knowledge of God, when he had quite missed God’s 
real nature. From his conversion onward, he is less 
of a dogmatist and more of a learner; and knowledge 
and vision come from obedience. ‘The depths of 
God” it is Paul’s life-work and supreme interest to 
explore; he does not exhaust them. One of the 
reasons why Paul has been so inadequately studied of 
late years is that he was for long construed as a final 
authority, and his writings taken as a compendium of 
Theology, while his own idea was that he was a learner. 
“Who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may 
instruct him?” he asks, quoting the Septuagint, and 
using “the Lord” to represent God; and he con- 
cludes, ‘‘ but we have the mind of Christ.”1 The 
passage is a vindication of the one right way of approach 
to God, as Luther saw and said with emphasis. 

One fruitful source of new knowledge was the active 
practical life which Paul led. The Spirit, as he 
believed, communicated to him what he was required 
to do, and where he was to go. ‘There were, as Paul 
indicates, those who criticized him on this score, and 
suggested that he was apt to change his plans with 
disconcerting abruptness,? and to lay all at the door 
of the Spirit. We need not linger over the criticism 
at this point; its real value is that it shows that Paul 

11 Cor. ii. 163; Isaiah xl. 13. sles Coritet7. 


110 PAUL OF TARSUS 


was constantly on the outlook for signals and instruc- 
tions, and that these uniformly bore upon his work. 
He was driven into endless preaching, teaching, and 
argument—constant collision on the deepest planes of 
thought and feeling with all sorts of men, and always 
for a practical object. It is not suggested in his own 
writings, nor in Luke’s, but the evidence is set out 
by both for the fact, that he lived a life not unlike that 
of Socrates, always in colloquy with some man or other 
—colloquy that turned, as quickly as he could get it to 
turn, to what he held central, the mind of God as 
revealed in the Cross. Every discussion gave him a 
fresh opportunity of insight into the human mind 
and its re-actions to the idea of God; and thus his 
obedience to the call to evangelize contributes to his 
‘baptism with all experiences.” A man so earnest, 
so apt quickly to reach with men the most serious 
things of all, so swift to refer all that he saw or 
divined in men’s approaches or departures to what he 
knew already of Christ—‘‘ comparing spiritual things 
with spiritual’? '—was bound inevitably to grow. 
Such a life has another side; it involves a man who takes 
it seriously in the instinctive habit of instantaneous 
prayer; he has to be in momentary communication 
with his Captain, always ready for the signal, the hint, 
where to press forward, what to emphasize, and so 
forth. He is watching God and watching man very 
closely in every such encounter; and his prayer-life 
is made by the habit; and something of what his 
prayer-life was, he lets us see in the Eighth of Romans. 

At the same time Paul was not a natural saint. If 
he had not lived so long ago, and if his writings had not 
been included in the canon, he might not have been 
classed as a saint at all. He has the defects of his 
qualities, as we shall see or have seen in other chapters ; 
he has his battle with sin after as before his conversion. 
The principalities and powers showed no sign of allow- 

ay Cor wats, 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE III 


ing a victory “‘ without dust,” as the ancients put it. 


Here, too, in the battle with weakness and temptation, 
with solitude and irritability (too little of men and 
too much of them), with discomfort, privation, and 
danger, with restlessness and despair,1 there was 
revelation in finding himself ‘‘ more than conqueror 
through him that loved us” ;? and Paul does not 
seem to have outgrown the wonder of it. 

He weighed this fact of constant support, of the 
steady supply * of a strength which he was conscious 
he had not in himself, and he drew an inference. He 
grew more and more certain of his Christian position 
and realized that he was only at the beginning of his 
experience. The gift of the Spirit as he knew it was 
not finality; it was only “the earnest money ” 
(appaBdv).4 He tells the Philippians that he is 
“‘ persuaded that he that hath begun a good work in 
them will perfect it to the day of Christ Jesus; ” 5 
and he believes that God will finish in Paul himself 
what He has begun, and that the Spirit is the “‘ earnest 
of our inheritance.”” Sometimes the figure is varied, 
and the Holy Spirit is the seal with which God marks 
His own. At a rather later day, though still within 
the period of what we may call the early church, the 
metaphor of sealing was applied to baptism;7 the 
sealing of the brow was part of the initiation into the 
rites of Mithras ;* but to Paul baptism was not what 
it became tothe Church. Toa Jew of his day Christian 
baptism was one of several baptisms, significant indeed 
—for a man is “ buried with Christ in baptism,” ® 
crosses a line and leaves an old life with its associations 


behind, and is dead to the world and his old friends— 


1 2 Cor. i. 8, 9. 2 Rom. vill. 37. Cf. at large 2 Cor. iv. 7-11. 

* Gal. ili. 5. SeaiCor, 1 22. 

® Phil. 1. 6. SA Corey. 2270 ODN. 1a ks. 

7 Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas (Hibbert Lectures), p. 295 ; 
add reff. to 2 Clem R., 26; Hermas, Simi/le, ix. 16, 4. 

* Tertullian de praescr, 40. * Col. i. 12. 


112 PAUL OF TARSUS 


but it is not magical in any degree. Paul, as we shall 
see, never in his extant writings alludes to his own 
baptism. It seems more reasonable to interpret Paul 
by Paul rather than by Hermas or by Hermes,! and to 
suppose his meaning to be that the gift of the Holy 
Spirit is God’s seal upon the Christian, a stamp of 
ownership and a promise. ‘This interpretation seems 
more consonant with the language of the great Hebrew 
prophets, whom we know to have influenced him, the 
great interpreters of God whom he had known from 
boyhood. 

It is to be noted, if it is not already clear, that the 
metaphor of earnest money or of seal is insufficient. A 
seal is essentially a dead thing and inert; earnest- 
money is in its way useful. Neither exhausts, and 
hardly either metaphor even suggests, what Paul seems 
to mean. ‘The Holy Spirit is for him above all things 
life; and in the heightened life, the new spiritual 
and intellectual energy, the new joy and exercise in 
freedom, he sees, not unreasonably, the promise of a 
yet further development of life and energy. ‘This view 
of the matter brings it more into line with all spiritual 
and intellectual development, every stage of which is 
a promise and a guarantee of another, and yet of 
others still beyond ; so that Paul’s phrase gains weight 
from its coincidence with a law of our nature, and 
the recognition of what the gift actually is (the 
heightened vitality) and of what it promises (still 
fuller and deeper life) adds certainty to Paul’s inter- 
pretation of his experience. Something of the same 
kind is to be seen in Bunyan; Grace Abounding tells the 
story of his religious life; so do both the parts of 
The Pilgrim’s Progress, but with what a different note 
of assurance and gaiety! When acceptance of Christ 
and obedience to him have actually worked out in a 


1 Not those of Rom. xvi. 14. 
*H. A.A. Kennedy, Paul and Mystery Religions, p- 240, doubts 
any reference to baptism in the term “ sealing.” 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 113 


new realization of life, a new power to overcome, a 
new venturesomeness and general vitality, there must 
result a new certainty in a man’s conviction. 

To sum up then, and perhaps to anticipate points 
that must be more fully handled at a later stage, Paul 
finds that obedience has resulted in vision. A worker 
as well as a thinker, a man born for intimacy with other 
men and with a genius for friendship, he begins with 
the obvious duty of “* preaching Christ ” to the men 
he meets and then to men whom he has to go and seek ; 
from Damascus and Tarsus he looks on to Rome and 
to Spain! But ‘ preaching Christ” is not always 
what a man expects it to be. He is involved in the 
effective interpretation of Jesus Christ along the lines 
of experience—and of all sorts of experience. He 
finds revelation in work, in the world, among men. 
More than once, in moments of great crisis—at 
Corinth, at Jerusalem, on the ship—a quiet hour 
brings illumination of all the storm and stress in which 
he is moving—‘‘ Be not afraid; be of good cheer, 
Paul; for I am with thee.” 2? ‘That the revelation is 
not to be discounted as subjective or psychopathic or 
imaginative, or whittled away with any other unre- 
flective adjective, is shown by the man’s development. 
Once more we may remind ourselves that, like Plato, 
Paul is not a system, or a scheme of ideas, but a man 
living among men, testing thoughts,? and constantly 
developing his ideas. His growth is traceable in his 
epistles; those written to the Thessalonians are 
hardly comparable with the letters to the Romans 
and to the Philippians, whatever we make of that 
entitled “‘ To the Ephesians.” 

With years—and this is not every man’s experience— 


1 Rom. xv. 24. 

* By blending the passages (Acts xviii. 9; xxiii. 11), one realizes 
that the phrases are those familiar to readers of the Gospels as the 
constant language of Jesus, yx) poPov, Odpcet. 

31 Thess. v. 21, ravra Soxipacere. 


H 


114 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Paul’s sympathies widen, and he grows at once in 
attractiveness to men, and in liking for them, and 
understanding of them. ‘The delicate tact of the letter 
to Philemon is familiar, but we sometimes forget how 
utterly alien to Paul in race and social standing, in 
intellectual and religious outlook, nearly everybody 
mentioned in the letter had originally been. ‘There 
were other men of yet other types who felt his appeal— 
a Felix, a Julius. We shall have to return to his friend- 
ships, but for the moment the width and multitude 
and variety of them sustains our point of his spiritual 
growth ; and the impulse that set him to win men, 
with growing tact, and sympathy ever more real, was 
his surrender to the ideals and purposes of Christ— 
his obedience. If he latterly uses vocabulary which 
suggests to students of other systems than Judaism 
an intimacy with them that once was not suspected, 
then, without supposing his original Jewish outlook to 
have been contaminated with pagan affinities, or his 
loyalty to clear thinking and to Christ to have become 
touched with magical hypotheses, one may attribute 
it to a growing patience, if not perhaps a growing 
sympathy, with ideas once alien, and with men once 
alien who thought in terms of those ideas. If Paul 
will be “ all things to all men,” ? he will perhaps be 
ready to use any vocabulary that will bring home 
to them the real value of Christ. The use of alien 
vocabularies is always risky ; you may borrow the word 
and use it without fully realizing all its connotation ;# 
but Paul was not a man of vocabularies. Whatever 
he said came with the whole man and his whole 
experience behind it, and his words meant what he 
chose them to mean—as is always the way with great 
personalities. What people who never saw him face 


1 See pp. 178, ff. * y Consimtaae 

>The Master of a Cambridge College, who praised a 
missioner as “a perfect rotter at good works,” may suffice as 
an illustration. 


THE LIFE OF OBEDIENCE 115 


to face, never saw the quick hand flung out,! and never 
heard the talk that men could listen to for hours,? 
made of his manuscript letters was bound to be another 
thing. However, our present point is his enlarging 
range in friendship. 

With this went inevitably, as we have seen, a closer 
reading of human nature, a fuller knowledge of other 
~men’s weaknesses and of his own, and a firmer belief 
in men when fortified by Christ dwelling in them. In 
spite of that fuller knowledge of his limitations, which 
years bring to all men—or, perhaps more truly, because 
of it—he grows more conscious of a power behind 
him * and within him. He realizes more and more 
from experience the value of the Gospel for all sorts 
and conditions of men, its universality.4 The proof 
of this lies in his growing gift for finding his way 
through the tangles of the nascent church—tangles 
intellectual, moral, and social. He is abreast of every 
situation, and if he begins with a face to face encounter, 
a frontal attack on Peter at Antioch, later on men 
complain that he captures them by guile.5 On the 
claims of Christ he compromised as little at the end 
as he did at the beginning; but he was always ready 
to arrange a difficult situation by throwing his own 
claims and feelings overboard. He takes more and 
more trouble to understand men’s perversities and 
obscurities, their prejudices and blunders, to con- 
ciliate them, and by dint of sheer friendship to bring 
them to understand how far their ideas were really 
“according to Christ.” ‘“‘And this I do for the 
Gospel’s sake.” ® 

How much more he progressively found in Christ 
will require at least another chapter; but here we 
may close with the suggestion of an American thinker, 


1 Acts xili. 16; xxi. 40; xxvi. 1; different movements of the 

hand are implied in the two words used. 3 Acts xx. 7. 
Sez eA. 1V,( 17. «x Cor. 1.243; Rom. i. 16. 
Becor, Xu: 16. sir Gory in 23. 


116 PAUL OF TARSUS 


that “the persistent and continuous dedication of 
the will” is more than natural endowment; that 
“‘ capacity grows out of desire much oftener than desire 
out of capacity.”1 In short, Paul was made by the 
steady habit, based on affection, of “ bringing into 
captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.” ? 


1 Peabody, Aftermoons ia the College Chapel, p. 167. 
® 2 Cor. x. §. 


Cuarter VI 
“THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL ” 


Tue Christian Church early reached the conviction 
that the hour of Christ’s first coming was not a matter 
of accident. God had His purposes clear—* before the 
foundation of the world,” and all history was the 
working out of His design “ that in the fulness of times 
He might gather together in one all things in Christ.” } 
The disclosure of this purpose and its development 
were clearly to Paul a constant source of wonder and 
interest. It was part of his Jewish inheritance to 
believe that God had any real design in history at all. 
To the Stoic all things moved by irresistible necessity 
in a cycle, long indeed but finite; and when the cycle 
was complete it was begun again, and the “ sorrowful 
weary wheel” (to borrow an expression from a gold 
tablet found in an Orphic’s grave) went on for ever 
and ever, as ages of rotation progressed only to general 
conflagration and meaningless renewal. ‘The Jew must 
have counted such a belief a blank negation of the 
very idea of God. ‘The great prophets saw otherwise 
than the Stoics, and the business of the apocalyptic 
writers was to forecast a genuine design of God’s, 
which should end in a real triumph. Little wonder 
that Paul found purpose in God’s work ; little wonder 
that to a weary world a course with an end to it, a 
chance of achievement, appealed, that it satisfied the 
human instinct for reality. The curse of the tread- 
mill in old prisons was that it went on for ever and 
effected nothing; the Stoic’s world was a treadmill as 
surely as its inhabitants were prisoners. 
1 Eph. i. 4, 10. 
117 


118 PAUL OF TARSUS 


In an age when scholarship and science—intellect 
on its acquisitive side—have first challenged and then 
largely deadened the philosophic element in man, over- 
powering it with masses of not wholly digested fact 
and casting doubt on the validity of its function in 
any case, it may sound a little naive to find once 
more design in history. But the historical student 
of to-day, however scientific his conception of history, 
will allow a presentment of the factors which worked 
for the establishment of the church; indeed it would 
not be scientific history at all if these were omitted. 
So, whatever our interim theory may be—and perhaps 
it will be better to essay the task without too much 
theory—we may address ourselves to the nidus from 
which came the church. 

It is perhaps hard for a modern thinker, even after 
years of war, to realize that to the ancient the separa- 
tion of races was at least as natural as their meeting 
and co-operation. Yet India should give us a hint 
to expect it. In that country, on an avowed basis 
of religion, communities have stood apart for ages; 
but below the basis of religion is often one of race. A 
member of the little Jewish group known as Bene Israel 
will not marry a Jew of Cochin, ** Black ” or “* White,” 
nor a Bagdadi Jew, nor a Jew from Europe. ‘There 
is at least one group of Moslems, of Rajput origin, 
real or reputed, whose members will not marry outside 
it—a rare case of caste invading Islam. How should 
a Parsi marry a Hindu, or a Brahmin, generally speaking, 
a low-caste woman? Athens, in the age of Pericles, 
on political or economic grounds, reversed her practice, 
and refused citizenship to the child who had not two 
Athenian parents; and that meant, I suppose, that 
the union of Athenian with non-Athenian was hardly 
marriage. 

Yet there were things that bound Greek to Greek, 
as every Greek knew, and as surely severed them from 
foreigners and barbarians. ‘ Many and great are the 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 119 


reasons that hinder ” Athenians from making common 
cause with the Persians, say they to the envoys of 
Sparta; “first and greatest, the images and houses of 
the gods set on fire or reduced to ruins,” and “ secondly, 
there is the bond of Hellenic race, by which we are of 
one blood, and of one speech, there are the common 
temples of the gods and the common sacrifices, the 
manners of life which are the same for all.””1 Blood, 
language and literature, religion with its gods and 
oracles and games and heroes, common culture and 
common customs, bound the Hellenes together, and 
marked them off from all the world beside. ‘“ The 
very interest in barbarian states and tribes, including 
the uncivilized, implies the growing consciousness 
of a common Hellenism ’’;? and, as this conscious- 
ness developed, hatred or contempt for the barbarian 
grew withit. Isocrates, of course, preached war against 
Persia for forty years, and his policy perhaps colours 
his general views. ‘“ The Eumolpidai and the Heralds 
at the celebration of the mysteries, because of our 
hatred of the Persians, forbid the holy things to other 
barbarians as well, just as they do to murderers. So 
natural is our hostility to them, that of all stories we 
linger most pleasantly over the Trojan and the Persian 
Wars. ... 1 think Homer’s poetry got the greater 
glory, because he sang well the praises of those who 
fought the barbarian;”’ and the Greeks, he con- 
tinues, gave to Homer’s art its place in competition 
and education that the young might learn the old hatred 
andimitateit. Aristotle says that the Greeks regarded 
barbarians as “ naturally slaves.” 4 In both authors 
“by nature”? means a great deal more than it does 
with us; it is not the equivalent of ‘‘ by disposition ” 


1 Herodotus, viii. 144; cf. Dr Macan’s note in his edition of 
Herodotus, iv.-vi., vol. ii. p. xxvi., giving illustrations from the 
historian. 

2 Macan, /oc. cit. 3 Isocrates, Paneg., 157-159. 

* Aristotle, Politics, i. 6, 6, p. 1255a3; and compare i. 5, 9. 


120 PAUL OF TARSUS 


“temperament,” but rather that in the nature of 
things, by natural law, Greeks are enemies of Persians, as 
we might say that cats are of mice, or horses of camels,? 
and that by natural endowment certain tribes are slaves, 
as sheep are four-legged. Nature was coming to mean 
more and more to Greeks; so that, when racial anti- 
pathies are referred to Nature, Greeks imply that they 
are fundamental, beyond reason and beyond change. 

At first, it is true, the Greek impressed the Roman, 
who was anxious for a while to be recognized as by 
blood related to one of the heroic races that fought 
at Troy. But by Cicero’s day things had changed. Of 
course, in public speech, the orator will uphold the 
primacy of the people to whom he speaks, but even 
when his case requires him to represent the Sicilian 
Greeks as the most reasonable of men, he now and then 
lets slip phrases which betray the Roman contempt 
for the whole Greek tribe. Apart from his Greek 
freedman, iro, he has no Greek correspondent, and 
his letters show constantly how lightly he thought of 
them—“ I am sick,” he says, ‘* of their want of character 
(levitas), their obsequiousness, their devotion, not to 
principle, but to the profit of the hour.” 2 A hundred 
and fifty years later there was the same contempt, as 
Juvenal shows with his Graeculus esuriens.? And all 
this in face of Roman admiration for Greek litera- 
ture and delight in Greek art. 

How the Jew felt for Greek and Roman alike, we 
have already seen. The attitude of the Gentile to the 
Jew is shown by Juvenal,‘ and in a significant passage 
of Epictetus, who asks: ‘‘ Why do you play at being 
a Jew, when you are a Greek? ”5 Celsus, about a.p. 

1 Herodotus, 1. 80; cf. Polybius, v. 84, on the African elephant’s 
dread of the Indian elephant’s smell and of his trumpeting. 

2 Cf. J. P. Mahaffy, Silver Age of Greece, pp. 162-169; Cicero, 
Epp. ad Quintum Fratrem, 1, 2, 4. 

$ Juvenal, iii. 78, and the whole passage. 


« Juvenal, xiv. ror- 104. 
* Epictetus, Discourses, ii. 7, 19; with some odd allusion to baptism. 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 121 


178, denounces as foolish and impracticable the Chris- 
tian sentiment that it is desirable for all who inhabit 
the empire, Greeks and barbarians, in Asia, Europe, 
and Libya, to agree to one law or custom 4—this 
after two centuries of the imperial system. 

Finally, on this point, the surprise which Paul 
clearly expected his friends to feel, and perhaps felt 
himself, at the revelation of ‘‘ God’s secret ”’ that there 
were to be no longer Jew and Gentile, Greek and bar- 
barian, bond or free, is evidence of the deep-seated 
sense of race, which had survived Alexander and his 
successors, and the Roman conquest. Blood and 
custom and religious usage were expected to keep 
Gentile races apart; and the exclusive knowledge of 
the true God was a barrier that separated the Jew 
from all other breeds. 

Yet the forces at work in the world were surely and 
steadily working against the tradition and in favour 
of God’s design, as Christians later on realized. Alex- 
ander the Great had changed the face of the world ; 
he had carried the Greek outside all known geography, 
he had introduced him to new lands, new races, and a 
new task.2 All the kingdoms of the world and the 
glory of them were to be amenable to the Greek spirit. 
Hellenism began; the whole of mankind was to be 
taught to think; criticism, examination, the sense of 
proportion, were to rule in art and literature and 
religion, in every activity of the mind of man. Greek 
Buddhas from the Swat valley and from Turkestan, 
and Greek literature, letters and business documents, 
from the sands of Egypt, are material reminders of the 
union of the whole world in one culture, in one attitude 
of mind. The city state with its dour determination 
to have no relations with its neighbour—sheer mastery 
of that neighbour excepted—began to look very 

1 Origen, contra Celsum, viii. 72. 

* See Edwyn Bevan, House of Seleucus, Vol. I., Chap. 1.3 and 
p- 28 of the same book. 


122 PAUL OF TARSUS 


parochial and trivial. Athens ceased to be an Empire 
and became a University, and what she had failed to 
do as the one, she did as the other. The ready 
homage offered to Athens by all civilized mankind was 
only challenged by Alexandria, and only in so far as 
Alexandria itself adopted Athenian ideals. Greeks went 
everywhere, by every trick of question and satire, and 
by every art of beauty, tempting the tribes to become 
citizens of one great Republic of the human mind; 
and not in vain. ‘The Greek trader might be as sordid 
and money-loving as his Semitic rival and neighbour 
in Alexandria or Antioch, in Babylon or Kandahar ; 
but he could not help being the missionary of something 
better. In proportion as men everywhere under- 
stood or even picked up the Greek attitude to life and 
the world, to things material and ideal, the world 
became one. The Bactrian felt the influence and 
coined gold pieces with his own head and a Greek 
inscription. ‘The Jew felt it and wrote books in a 
new vein, Ecclestastes and Ecclestasticus, the Wisdom 
of Solomon, Greek dramas on the Exodus,! and the library 
that bears Philo’s name. ‘The Phoenician felt it, 
turned Greek and taught the Greek and the Roman 
Stoicism. How far the races commingled their blood, 
it is hard to guess; Alexander held strongly that 
they ought to, and he promoted thousands of mixed 
marriages. But literature is not generally interested 
in half-castes, and we only hear of them by accident. 
If it had not been that Paul wished for the moment 
to conciliate Jewish prejudice, we might never have 
heard that Timothy had a Greek father—perhaps 
not quite as Greek as the technical term suggests 
to us—and a pious Jewish mother and grandmother, 
both, it may be noted, bearing Greek names. 

Rome inherited the Empire and the task of Alex- 
ander. Perhaps the most striking thing in the testi- 


1 The work of an Ezekiel, extracts from which are given by Eusebius, 
Praeparatio Evangelii, ix. 28, pp. 436-447. 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 123 


monies of the rest of the world to Rome’s work is 
the emphasis on peace and on the freedom of travel. 
Pliny was of course a Roman, but he may give us a text. 
At the beginning of the twenty-seventh book of his 
Natural History, he speaks with interest of the growth 
of botanical knowledge; how one herb of healing 
comes from Maeotis (the Sea of Azov), another from 
Atlas “‘ beyond the pillars of Hercules, where Nature 
herself ends,” others from British isles outside the 
world, and so forth; and all are interchanged see 
thanks to “ the boundless majesty of Roman peace’ 
“may that gift of the gods, I pray, be eternal! for in 
truth the Romans seem to have given a second daylight 
to mankind.” “‘ You see,” says Epictetus, the Greek 
slave and Stoic philosopher, “‘ that Caesar seems to give 
us great peace, that there are no longer wars, nor 
battles, nor great brigandage or piracy; but a man 
may travel in every season on the roads, and may 
sail from the rising to the setting sun.” ? Philo the 
Jew praises Augustus, ““ who not only loosened but 
abolished the bonds in which the whole habitable 
world was previously bound and weighed down; who 
destroyed both the evident and the unseen wars, 
which arose from the attacks of robbers; who set the 
sea free from the ships of pirates and filled it with 
merchantmen.” ? In the last century of the Empire 
in the West Claudian says the same *—and those who 
have studied Greek tragedy will feel the irony of this 
last voice of Rome on the very eve of her dissolution :— 


Rome! Rome alone has found the spell to charm 
The tribes that fell beneath her conquering arm, 
Has given one name to the whole human race, 

And clasped and sheltered them in fond embrace, 


1 Epictetus, Diatridai, III. xiii. 9. 

2 Philo, de Legatione ad Gaium, 21; cf. Skeel, Travel in the First 
Century, p. 30, a book as attractive as it is scholarly. 

® Claudian, Cows. Stilich., iii. 150. Claudian was an Egyptian 
Greek who wrote in the language, thythm, and spirit of Virgil. (Dr 
T. Hodgkin’s translation.) 


124 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Mother, not mistress, called her foe her son. 
And by soft ties made distant countries one. 
Tis to her peaceful sceptre all men owe— 
That through the nations, wheresoe’er we go, 
Strangers, we find a fatherland ; our home 

We change at will; may watch the far-off foam 
Break upon Thule’s shore and call it play, 

Or through dim, dreadful forests force our way, 
That we may tread Orontes’, Ebro’s, shore— 
That we are all one nation evermore. 


Tertullian, about a.p. 200, and the Persian Afrahat, 
who wrote homilies in Syriac a generation or two later, 
have both the definite idea that Rome is to last as 
long as the world, and that Rome and the world will 
go together. But they of course were Christians. 
How far men in general recognized the significance 
of the new order, when Rome became definitely 
mistress of a united world, or even when the civil wars 
ceased and an imperial master ruled from Atlantic 
to Euphrates, it is hard to guess. It is not easy for 
one generation to realize what stirs the imagination 
of another. Our data are fragmentary and various. 
Agrippa superintended the completion of an Orbis 
Pictus in Rome, which perhaps Julius Caesar first 
ordered.t_ It was delineated on the walls of a portico, 
and it is held that it was not really a map as we might 
have supposed, a map with the proper configuration 
of lands and seas, but it was designed to figure the order 
and distances of places on road and coast and river, the 
size, look, and features of the provinces and districts 
of the Empire, and all on a level more or less available 
for those who used the portico. Map or plan, or 
whatever it should more properly be called, it was the 
outcome of years of surveying work, and it must have 
brought home to Romans that unity of the world, 
which their fathers had achieved and they guarded. 
Virgil’s great note cannot have resounded in vain. 


1 Pliny, Natur. Hist., IIl., 2, (3), 17. See Merivale, History of 
the Romans, \v. pp. 401, 402. 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 125 


Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento 
(Hae tibi erunt artes) pacisque imponere mores 
Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos. 


Romans must have realized something of the better 
aspects of their achievement. But whether they or 
their subjects grasped what Caesar symbolized by 
putting Gauls in the Roman Senate, it is hard to say ; 
Augustus, with his eye on old Roman prejudice, 
turned the Gauls out. Claudius, Paul’s contemporary, 
was able to bring Gauls in again—a thoroughly weak 
emperor achieving what a strong one had feared to do 
or had disliked. 

It is notorious how freely persons in search of 
education or of historic sites, or with a philosophy to 
expound ? or an initiation to vend, travelled the whole 
Mediterranean. When about 499 B.c. Aristagoras of 
Miletus suggested to King Cleomenes of Sparta that 
he might with advantage lead a Spartan army to Susa, 
and carelessly let fall that it meant marching three 
months’ journey from the Mediterranean, he was 
ordered to be out of Sparta by sundown—a revelation 
of the unfamiliaiity of the idea of travel. Paul, as we 
know, travelled like a modern commercial traveller, who 
forgets how many times he has crossed the Atlantic; 
he has the habit, and hardly thinks about it. 

In a later day, about a.p. 380, Prudentius, the great 
Latin Christian poet, again and again inculcates the 
Providential ordering of all this unification of man- 
kind—Christ willed the course of kingdoms in due 
sequence, and the triumphs of Rome, in order that, 
when the ages were fulfilled, he might impart 
himself ; God would bind together nations discordant 
in speech, various in worship, and bring all under one 
sway, a union of hearts; no union would be worthy 
of Christ, did not one mind link race to race ;—Christ 


1 Cf. Suetonius, Fu/ius, 80. 
* Cf. Strabo, c. 673, on Tarsian travellers. * Herodotus, v. 50. 


126 PAUL OF TARSUS 


is author of the walls of Rome, who set the sceptre at 
Rome as head of the world and bade mankind submit 
to the Roman toga and arms, that all the jangling races 
might learn customs and culture, that all their tongues, 
their genius and their rites might know one set of 
laws ;—this was achieved by the Roman empire’s 
successes and triumphs, the way was prepared for 
Christ’s coming.} 

In this cosmopolitan world the Christian Paul was 
entirely at home. A Roman citizen, he had no quarrel 
with the government, nor generally with its officials. 
If magisterial action at Philippi was hasty,? it led him 
to mention his citizenship the sooner to Claudius 
Lysias. At Ephesus the Asiarchs took the pains to 
do him a good turn.4 Where Greek was spoken, and 
where Jews resorted, he went, but hardly to outlying 
mountains where Celtic prevailed. As Deissmann has 
put it, the places connected with Paul are almost 
without exception to be found noted on even the 
smallest map; and he points out that a number of 
them are already on railway lines and some approached 
by steamships as well to-day—not that we are to 
suppose that the capitalists who built the lines were 
thinking of Paul, but that he and they alike have had 
eyes to recognize real lines of communication, and the 
real centres to which men will inevitably gravitate. 
Tarsus, Jerusalem, Damascus, Konieh (Iconium), 
Ephesus, Laodicea, Colossae, Hierapolis, ‘Thessalonica, 
Beroea, Athens, Corinth, and Rome dot his itineraries. 
He certainly did not flee the world. Our next step 
is to ask what he found in this new cosmopolitan 
world, in which Alexander first and then the Romans 
had broken down the barriers and brought the races 
together. 


1'The four passages summarized are: do. Symm., i. 287 f.; 
Ado. Symm., ii. 582 f.; Steph. li. 4133; Ado. Symm., ii. 618. See 
Life and Letters in the Fourth Century, Chap. XI. 

* Acts xvi. 22, 37, 39. ® Acts xxii. 25. “ Acts xix. 31. 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 127 


The spiritual outlooks of the age are peculiarly inter- 
esting and not a little complicated. Primitive animism 
here, there savage superstition, hold their own, rein- 
forced by magic, by belief in daemons now reduced 
almost to a system, by astrology and by philosophy. 
At Lystra we are told that the common people and 
then the priests were prepared to believe Paal and 
Barnabas to be gods appearing in the likeness of men ? 
—a notion which Euripides and his friends would have 
thought old-tashioned enough in Pindar. Plutarch’s 
so-called Moral Treatises are the great exposition of 
the prevailing view that gods and daemons are two 
classes of beings; and these writings and the books 
of Apuleius, written about fifty years later, are the 
great classical sources for daemon-lore. ‘There we 
have from the non-Christian side much the same 
general view set forth as meets us in the Christian 
apologists,2 who drew some of their material from 
Jewish apocalyptic. But good or bad, whether souls 
of men ascending to the ranks of gods, or fallen angels 
who had rebelled against Jehovah,‘ there the daemons 
are. Now they mediate between gods and men, 
“‘ bearers hence of prayers, thence of gifts,” guardian 
spirits of men; now they claim godhead on false 
pretences for themselves. They are everywhere— 
bringers of disease and lunacy, givers of oracles, authors 
of everything odd or strange, infesting human life 
and making it terrible by night and by day, for 
even ‘sleep makes no truce with superstition ”°— 
“ten thousand tyrants, haters of men,” ‘Tatian calls 
them. Magic, poisoning, conjuring, and astrology all 
flourished, the last a new and dreadful source of despair. 
It is not till one reads Plutarch, the Jewish apocalyptic 


1 Acts xiv. II. 2 Eg. Barnabas, 7. 

*Cf. Clemen, Primitive Christianity and non-Fewish Sources, 
pp. 83-94, 109-114, 367-8; Kennedy, Paul and Last Things, pp. 
325-327- 

* Enoch, xiii.; cf. Enoch, vili. 1; ix.63 x. 4-63 liv. 13 Ixxxviii. 1. 


128 PAUL OF TARSUS 


writers, the Christian apologists, and the fragmentary 
notices of the heresies, that one can realize the enormous 
incubus that the congested superstitions of all the 
world imposed upon mankind. Every race had its 
ghostly or spiritual terrors, and none could be neglected. 
The liberating power of the Gospel cannot be under- 
stood till one realizes what the daemons cost mankind. 

There was not in the world intellectual energy 
enough to repel the attack of recrudescent superstition. 
We have seen in our day what absurd beliefs can be 
generated in dark rooms among people who lack philo- 
sophy and have no practical acquaintance with conjur- 
ing. In those days, as Tacitus cruelly says, “ the 
great geniuses had ceased.” ? Culture was indeed 
widely diffused ; but there was too much receptiveness 
and too little criticism in the intellectual atmosphere. 
There had been great progress in natural science in 
favoured quarters, under the rule of Alexander’s 
successors. Astronomy, mathematics, geography, medi- 
cine had been greatly advanced; but there was a 
want of chemistry, and psychology, in its modern 
developments, was of course not to be expected.. Con- 
juring,* chemistry, and a little psychology explain 
many things to-day, for which in antiquity superstition 
alone could offer an explanation, and against which 
reason could only bring a mute contempt or the charge 
of lying. But, as we can believe, the witnesses to be 
cross-examined were very often not lying at all; they 
had seen things for which there was no rational 
explanation. ‘There was not enough popular know- 
ledge of disease ; the frequent charges of poison, which 
we meet in the works of Tacitus, are one indication 

1As Bishop E. W. Barnes has said, “ England during the last 
seventy years has become progressively less religious and more 
superstitious.” 

2 Tacitus, Histories, i. 1. 

® See Elias Henry Jones, Te Road to Endor, the story of a Ouija 


board in a prisoners’ camp in Turkey, as lively a narrative as could be 
wished, and a merciless exposure of spiritualistic methods. 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 129 


of this, and the ready credence given to daemon- 
possession is another. Medicine was commonly 
empirical and traditional. The scientific problems 
discussed in their books of Natural Questions by 
Plutarch and Seneca reveal a world where cock-and- 
bull stories found ready credence, and critics could 
only guess or quote; investigation generally there was 
none. ‘The plain fact was that the political life of 
eight centuries in Europe and Asia had, with all the 
stimulus of Greek environment, contributed none the 
less toward the reduction of the numbers of those whose 
brains worked actively; they were killed in party 
frays in Greece, in the wars of Alexander’s successors, in 
the civil wars of Rome; and the steady trend of all 
government to monarchical hands discouraged what 
was left of human genius. 

Yet we must look at another side of the story. In 
a way that always strikes the student of the great 
classical Greek writers with surprise, the development 
of personality had continued. Men, no longer citizens 
and statesmen, remained individuals, and became in 
fact individualists in practice, social and religious. 
There are traces of weariness of the flesh; Hellenistic 
people as well as Jews find Plato’s antithesis between 
body and soul, between material and spiritual, con- 
genial; they recognize evil as a force in the world, as 
a spiritual factor too. ‘They are dissatisfied with them- 
selves, not penitent (penitence is a Christian grace) 
but resentful, wishful to get clear of the annoyance of 
the sense of failure, the sense of uncleanness and 
defilement. It is not the same thing as Paul’s deep 
sense of sin and of moral failure and impotence, but 
people have grouped them together. ‘There is a 
nervousness and an uncertainty about conduct, a 
craving for expiation. ‘Theophrastus, Cicero, Horace, 
Plutarch, Juvenal, and Seneca all show people of the 
type, worried, frightened, credulous, and afraid they 
may be very wrong, too afraid to think anything out 


130 PAUL OF TARSUS 


very clearly, and others more intellectual but uneasy, 
and, as Seneca says, ‘‘ afraid not so much of drowning 
as of sea-sickness.” 1 We know how in revivals of 
outgrown religious ideas intellectual clearness is apt to 
be counted almost blasphemy or impiety. With this 
sense of insufficiency and uneasiness goes a craving 
for divine support. Much is said vaguely about 
mystery religions to-day, but again Apuleius gives us 
the great classical illustration. How far he was really as 
pious as he suggests, may be doubted. A vivid sense 
of humour is like the caps and rings with which heroes 
of legend make themselves invisible. The reader can 
never be quite certain with people like Apuleius how 
much is humour and how much is serious; piety may 
be protecting itself with humour, or humour may be 
making fun of piety, or both operations may be going 
on at once. Such phaenomena are still found. But 
at all events the ego of The Golden Ass is wonderfully 
converted at last, and goes from one expensive initia- 
tion to another, and sees the gods whom others, it is 
obvious, craved in earnest to know. 

There was weakness in the popular explanations of 
the universe. Men were not sure whether all was 
fate—the cipappévy of the ancients—or all was 
chance (rvy7). The stars in their courses made for 
determinism; but the wild and revolting accidents 
of life, the toss-ups on which kingdoms and thrones 
depended, and the devastations that followed the 
caprices of would-be kings, suggested that Menander 
was after all right, when he, or one of his characters, 
said outright that sheer fluke (ravrouarov) was probably 
god. Add to this distracting alternative the activities 
of daemons in Gentile regions—the wars of angels and 
devils in more Jewish areas—and what a world it is! 
The universe is either a great deal too disorderly, or 

1 Seneca, de trangquillitate animi, 1, 2 im statu ut non pessimo, ita 


maxime querulo et moroso positus sum: mec aegroto nec valeos 1, 17 
non tempestate vexor sed nausia. 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 131 


else everything in it is riveted a great deal too tight ; 
in either case thought and life become torment. 
Just as in medieval and modern India life in a world 
haunted with spirits, and the awful wheel of law, with 
its expiatory re-births, drive and have driven men to 
find new roads to sanity, so in the ancient world the 
fear of this life, the fear of re-birth into it, the fear of 
the unknown, compelled men to try to find some sure 
foothold in the divine. 

A great deal has been written of late years about 
mystery religions—the cults of Cybele, of Isis and 
Serapis, and at last of Mithras, to keep to the great’ 
names, and a good many more cults as to which we can 
hardly be certain of their periods, their places or their 
general diffusion. Men were undoubtedly turning to 
the Orient for light, as M. Cumont has shown us. 
The barbarians, after all, were the older peoples, or 
at least their civilizations were older; and the old had 
-more chance of being true, and so had the strange, 
the obscure, the exotic—omne ignotum pro magnifico. 
Promise enough, and people will believe you; every 
quack knows that side of human nature. Speak 
mysteriously of sin and purification, hint at hopes, and 
men distracted with worry will believe with a minimum 
of delay or examination. ‘The Greeks did not know 
much of the religion of Egypt, though Egypt after 
all lay at their doors, and they had traded and lived 
there for generations. Egyptologists are very severe, 
some of them, with Herodotus, and for Manetho 
there is little but contempt; he was thoroughly 
inaccurate, as far as he can be tested by modern 
research, and, it would seem, dreadfully dull. But 
the Greeks got something that answered—Egyptian to 
the degree perhaps that eighteenth century Gothic was 
Gothic, or Macpherson’s Ossian was Celtic ; if it was 
not exactly the real thing, it was very exciting, romantic 


1Erman, Egyptian Religion, p. 217, calls Manetho’s book “a 
melancholy piece of bungling.” 


132 PAUL OF TARSUS 


and mysterious. How Hellenized it all was, they did 
not guess, because they did not know the original 
language or cult. At any rate truth lay in synthesis ; 
if you believe and practice everything, you must some- 
where be entirely right. If you are expiated, and your 
sins are taken away temporarily, it must be to the 
good, and the oftener the better; the question of 
sinful instincts need not be raised. A little philosophy 
is good, as Callicles says in Plato’s Gorgias ; too much, 
he says, ruins life, and that it would certainly ruin 
religion Plutarch is quite convinced. So sacraments 
were the thing, to give a man “ salvation ”—what- 
ever precisely that might be—to win him “ re- 
generation” (aahuyyevecia), re-birth, and eventually 
“* deification.” Men and women formed associations 
for worship and sacrament. Taurobolio renatus in 
aeternum is an inscription over a grave, of a later date 
than Paul’s— Born again in the taurobolium, the 
baptism of bull’s blood, for eternity.” 

We do not know precisely the dates of the documents 
which reveal to us the liturgies or the theories of 
those who leaned to such cults. We do not know how 
widely the cults were spread or the documents cir- 
culated. The polemic of the Christian fathers down 
to the very end of paganism is mainly against the 
Olympian gods, the well-known gods, and not against 
the divinities of the mystery religions, well aware 
as they very often were of the ways and language 
of “Gnostic” teachers. But Wendland’s moving 
description is not without evidence—‘“an old 
and rich world of culture, dying and in agony, 
yearning for a new creation and re-birth, in all 
the unrest of a search for God, an unrest never 
to reach a goal ;—so shows itself to us the declining 
paganism.” 4 


1'Wendland, die hellenische-rimische Kultur, p. 186. Compare 
Wilamowitz too (Kultur der Gegenwart, i. 8, p. 92), the soul was 
“sensitive, responsive to sentimentalism and egoism, romantic, modern.” 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 133 


But paganism was not declining in Paul’s day, and 
had no thought of it; it had, like Hinduism a century 
ago, nothing but the consciousness of such eternity 
as a universe, probably to end in flame, would enjoy 
and impart. It was not even very conscious of its 
weakness. Greek polytheism had always been weak in 
moral content. ‘The mysteries of Greece were for the 
holy, not for the profane; but the conception of 
holiness was one that accepted the harlot with no 
suggestion of her abandoning her trade. So much is 
evident from the stories of the Greek orators and 
Eleusis, and it is evident again in the works of the 
elegiac poets of Rome. Neither Demeter nor Isis was 
very squeamish. When purification and holiness are 
spoken of, all depends on the conceptions of sin and 
holiness prevalent, and these in turn depend on the 
conception of God. 

In the centuries of Greek life it is little to be 
wondered at that the technical terms of philosophy 
and religion were somewhat cheapened in popular use, 
as they are in other societies. Many people to-day 
can talk of evolution who never read Darwin, and more 
can make loose use of psychological terms. Mysterion 
comes to mean what the Romans called sacramentum 
(a vague term, unless the date and other circum- 
stances of the particular use are considered), and it 
also means a secret. When Paul writes: ‘‘ In every- 
thing and in all things I have been initiated (wewvypar) 
both to be full and to be hungry, to have too 
much and to have too little,” +the playfulness of the 
language proves a colloquial use, but not necessarily 
personal knowledge of Greek mysteries. ®idocodety, to 
** philosophize ” about a situation was used by Greeks 
in the same easy way, without implying personal 
study in Porch or Academy. Other words,? perhaps 

2 Phil. iv. 12. 


* See generally Wendland, die hell.-rom. Kultur, pp. 156, 1853 
Clemen, Christianity and xon-Fewish Sources, pp. 68, 233. 


134 PAUL OF TARSUS 


less likely to be popular, are found common to Paul 
and to the documents of the mystery-religions— 
documents (once again) hard to date. ‘The contrasts 
between spirit and soul and flesh (avedpua, ; 
odp&, o@ua), between spiritual and heavenly on the 
one hand, and on the other between natural and 
earthly (avevpatixds, odpdvios, uyuKds, emiyetos), are 
noted, and such terms as transform and transfigure 
(werapopdhovo ba, peraoynpatilerOar). Some of these 
are shared by the Stoics of Paul’s day,1 and some are 
as old as Plato. Where language is so widely prevalent, 
a particular association between two groups of people, 
who use the same popular psychology, will be hard to 
establish to the exclusion of others.2_ Some other terms, 
similarly shared it is said, Paul may have got from 
Judaism. In the case of others again, it is suggested 3 
that Paul may have gained insight from his converts 
into what mystery religions had been for them ;— 
he might have, that is, if we are right in assuming 
first that his converts came from those ranks and 
classes of society (generally well-to-do Greeks and 
Hellenists) which supplied the adherents of those 
initiations, and, second, that some of them had 
actually been initiated; the two assumptions are 
not the same. Mr Montefiore, in his desire to dis- 
tinguish between Paul and more conventional Jews, 
suggests that Paul may “ have cast a wistful eye over 
the border, where the votaries of the Hellenistic 
mystery religions were claiming that they could conquer 
sinfulness at a bound.” 4 ‘This again assumes identity 


1 Cf. Seneca, Ep. vi. 1, Now emendari me tantum sed transfigurari. 

* Cf. Professor C. C. J. Webb, in Coastructive Quarterly, Sept. 
1918, p.445: ‘The evidence for the historical connexion of Chris- 
tianity with the known mystery religions of the Roman Empire is 
much less strong than is sometimes assumed.” See also the striking 
essay on “’The Gnostic Redeemer,” in Edwyn Bevan, Hellenism 
and Christianity. 

7H. A.A. Kennedy, Paul and Mystery Religions, pp. 280-1. 

“Montefiore, Fudaism and St Paul, p. 116. 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 135 


in date and outlook, and perhaps in the use of terms, 
which is yet to be proved. 

The strong contrast in Paul’s piety, says Wendland,} 
the dangerous antithesis of spirit and flesh, the tendency 
to asceticism, the inclination to hypostatize (personalize) 
or materialize spiritual functions and religious occur- 
rences (Vorgange), the conception of mysteries and 
revelation, the picture of the world in stages or 
storeys (cf. the third heaven), Paul’s experience of the 
journey upward, his realistic representation of the 
higher types of spirits and of the servitude of men 
under their power and of the battle against them, the 
yearning for redemption, broadening with Paul into 
cosmic significance—all these have analogies in purely 
heathen mysticism. Wendland compares the rela- 
tion of Plato to Orphism—a borrowing of terms with 
rejection of substance and a strong antipathy. We 
may admit the analogies; we have to allow the 
appearance of common terms, ¢.g. salvation (cwrnpia), 
the idea of re-birth (wadtyyeveria), but, once more, 
we have to be cautious about the dates of our mystery- 
documents, and we have to realize, first, that the 
connexion is not proved, and will not be till the dates 
are better established; we have to compare Paul’s 
use of Greek philosophic terms and occasional literary 
expressions, which he owed to the milieu and the 
atmosphere in which he lived, rather than to personal 
adventures in Greek culture; we have to realize that 
that milieu and atmosphere are so far not perfectly 
known to us; and finally we have to remember that 
he was a Jew, and how very Jewish he was. 

We have only to look at the language Paul uses 
of idols and their sacrifices; for the sacrifice, the 
mystical and sacramental meal, was of the essence of 
the mystery religion, its very centre and the ground of 
all the hopes and feelings associated with it. “I have 
eaten from a tambourine, I have drunk from a cymbal, 

1 Wendland, die hell.-rom. Kultur, p. 116. 


at 


136 PAUL OF TARSUS 


T have become an initiate of Attis’; so ran one snatch 
of initiatesong.t Nowhear Paul. ‘ As to eating things 
offered to idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the 
world, and that there is no God but one. Even if 
there are alleged gods, whether in the sky or on earth, 
for us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all 
things and we unto Him. . . . Meat will not commend 
us to God; neither if we refrain from eating, are we 
worse off, nor if we eat are we better.’’? This was 
flat denial, and there could hardly be more abrupt 
denial, of the central idea of the sacramental religions, 
from which some hold he borrowed. ‘“ What do I say? 
That meat offered to an idol is anything, or that an 
idol is anything? No, but that what they sacrifice, 
they sacrifice to daemons and not to God [cf. Psalm 
cvl. 37]; and I would not have you partakers (or 
partners) of daemons. You cannot drink the Lord’s 
cup and the cup of daemons; you cannot partake 
of the Lord’s table and the table of daemons.” * Here 
and elsewhere his tone is that of the Old ‘Testament, 
as many of the psalms will remind us. 

I cannot help feeling that the discussion of Paul’s 
relations with mystery religions and their terminology 
would have been different, if more of those who have 
discussed it had had personal experience of the heathen 
world. What was the effect of the sight and sound of 
heathenism on the Jewish mind? Round the corner 
sounds the gong that beats monotonously morning 
and evening in honour of Shitala, goddess of smallpox ; 
day by day you see her image as you go to the Uni- 
versity of Calcutta, you see educated men abasing 
themselves before—before a doll or a devil. You see 
shrines carved with legends of impurity, naked and 
unashamed, indescribable; you know quite well, and 
the priests know you know, what goes on in those 


1 Ouoted by Firmicus Maternus, 18, I. 2 Cor. vill. 4-9. 
* 1 Cor. x. 20, 21. It is remarkable perhaps that this is almost the 
only passage where Paul uses the term “ daemons.” 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 137 


temples—sacred prostitution flourishes in Southern 
India, as it did in the town of Corinth while Paul 
lived there two years; it was holy. It is more than 
possible to feel, as you look at a Hindu temple of the 
south, a thrill of satisfaction and sympathy with the 
Muslims who in God’s name destroyed such places. 
Every time you contrast the carved idols with the 
beautiful texts in Arabic with which the Muhammadan 
adorns his mosque, you stand once more with the 
monotheist. ‘That such were the feelings of the Jews 
in the Hellenistic world, we do not need to be told— 
their contempt for idols and idolaters, their hatred of 
them, the deep-going reaction against them, their 
repugnance in every fibre, need no commentary. Now 
let us picture a modern Muslim in India, filled with 
this spirit—‘ God’s curse upon all unbelievers |! ”— 
and he is converted to Christ; is it reason to think 
that, when he wishes to express the deepest things that 
Christ means to him, he will go to the mystical school 
of Chaitanya, and use the language that Chaitanya, in 
disorder and hysterics, used of his doll or devil? 
Would he not still put it so? If he is true to his 
experience, he will go to the deepest things of Islam ; 
he will not need to borrow from heathen mysticism ; 
and we know that to a Muhammadan mystic, who 
finds Christ, his old experience is not all foolishness.* 
If he has to render it ina popular language, he will use, 
so far as it is available, the terminology nearest him. 
The same, I think, or something like it, is the soundest 
account to be given of Paul; he is a Jew captured by 
Christ. 

We have next to look at the Jewish Dispersion, to 
which in most instances Paul always addressed him- 


1 See Duncan Black Macdonald, Aspects of Islam, p. 171. It has 
occurred to me that some reply might be made to me by saying that the 
Muslim converted to Christ would not need to borrow the language of 
Hindu mystics; he would have ready to his hand the language of the 
mystics of Islam. And Paul had the Old Testament. 


138 PAUL OF TARSUS 


self first. Philo of Alexandria is the outstanding figure, 
but Paul (as we have seen) for some reason appears 
never to have gone to Egypt—perhaps because closer 
ties bound him to Cilicia and Asia, and one step north- 
westward led to another. Nor is Paul much influenced 
by that school. Evidence abounds for the wide 
scattering of the Jews all over the Roman empire, 
and indeed outside it into Babylonia; and Judaism 
became the focus of a good deal of literature—anti- 
Semite1 and patriotic—of legend, too, not less 
patriotic. As we have seen in discussing the environ- 
ment at Tarsus and the Gentile question, the Dis- 
persion was bound to differ from the community in 
Palestine. Perhaps as real illumination as we are 
likely to get will come from such a book as Mary 
Antin’s Promised Land, a very vivid and human work— 
if we may take Poland for Palestine for the moment, 
and Boston (salva reverentia) and New York for 
Corinth and Alexandria; on the one side tradition 
and tribalism, on the other liberty, a larger world, a 
less exacting standard of observance, freer intercourse 
with the Gentile, and yet a consciousness of Israel and 
his history. ‘The parallel between one historical 
period and another can never be exact, but it may 
be suggestive— have voice for such as understand.” 
Wendland warns us not to under-estimate the con- 
nexion of the Dispersion and Palestine, the stiff unity 
of Jewish consciousness, mixed up with questions of 
pilgrimage and temple dues which were paid all over 
the world. He warns us not to over-estimate the 
influence of Greek philosophy.? If Philo gave up the 
Lg hope of Resurrection for the Greek doctrine of 
mmortality, Philo is never mentioned in the Talmud. 
Mr Israel Abrahams tells us that the New Testament 
is the best available source for knowledge of early 


1 Josephus, contra Apion., il. 79. 
2 'Wendland, Die hell-rom. Kultur, p. 210. 
* Wendland, Die hell.-rom. Kultur, p. 208 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 139 


synagogue procedure; and that the synagogue was the 
real religious centre of the Judaism of the Dispersion 
is proved by the ease with which it survived the total 
destruction of the Temple and the system associated 
with it. Professor Kirsopp Lake suggests that Paul 
and Silas were not quite like missionaries in a heathen 
world, but more resembled Wesley or Whitefield, in 
going primarily to a constituency who understood 
them and whom they understood, Jews and proselytes. 
To the latter they naturally spoke with more appeal. 
Amid all the religions that offered easy and emotional 
salvation, Judaism stood alone with the stern appeal 
of monotheism and morality. Here are the words of 
a typical man of the second century a.p., “‘ born in the 
land of the Assyrians,” as he says, a traveller far and 
wide in the Roman Empire, a student of Greek rhetoric 
and Greek art—for he gave attention to the great 
collections of it in Rome—and an initiate in various 
mysteries. He was shocked at the wickedness and 
cruelty allowed and practised in the name of religion, 
and “‘ when I was by myself, I sought in what way I 
might learn the truth. While I was still thinking of 
serious things, it befel me to light on certain barbarian 
writings, older than the philosophic teaching of the 
Greeks, more divine in contrast with Greek error. 
And it befel me to be convinced because their style 
was simple, because there was an absence of artifice 
in the speakers, because the structure of the whole 
was intelligible, because it showed fore-knowledge of 
the future, because the precepts were remarkable, and 
because they taught One ruler of the universe (Tov 
ohkwy TO povapyikov). My soul was taught of God, 
and I understood that, while Greek literature leads to 
condemnation, this ends our slavery in the world and 
rescues us from rulers many and ten thousand tyrants.” } 


1'Tatian, ad Graecos, 42, his birth; 35, his travels and studies, 
codpirtevoas Td tyuérepa, and the art-collections; 29, the Hebrew 
scriptures. 


140 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Such is the confession of Tatian, and Justin’s is much 
the same. Justin was keen to learn about God; he 
tried Stoic and Peripatetic, and at last in the desert 
met a shrewd questioner who directed him to philo- 
sophers older than Stoic or Peripatetic, older than 
Plato himself, and from these he came to Christ. 
Both men belong to the second century, but there 
were clearly many in the first century who were drawn 
in the same way to the synagogue and hung about it, 
proselytes in one degree or another. To men of this 
type the new religion of Paul had far more to offer than 
Judaism ; it was free from the drawbacks of Jewish 
particularism and legalism; and when once Chris- 
tianity was widely preached in the world, proselytes 
ceased to be made by Judaism, and at last were no 
longer sought or desired.? 

Outside the circle of the synagogue and its fringe 
of ‘‘ worshippers’? were the people who played at 
Jewish religion as they did with other Overall cults. 
The secular writers of Rome and Greece have many 
allusions to them. Nero’s Poppaea was the most 
famous of them.? ‘They need not delay us; they were 
not very serious students of religion, but their existence, 
their number and their occasional high place no doubt 
did more than secure Imperial favours for the Jews, 
and made it more possible for more serious persons to 
realize that there was such a religion and that there 
might be something in it. 

Finally, once more we have to think of the philo- 
sophic schools, widely spread, and all of them, positive 
or negative, intensely individualistic. Stoic or Epi- 
curean, it was all one; the centre was the man; he 
chose so and he lived so; and, if he were a Sceptic, he 
chose to make no choice and was perhaps even more 


1 Dialogue with Trypho, 2-8. 

* Cf. Lake, Earlier Epp. of Paul, p. 33. 

? For evidence, see B. W. Henderson, Life and Principate of Nero, 
p- 467; Merivale, History of the Romans, vi. p. 376. 


THE PREPARATION OF THE GOSPEL 141 


individualistic than the rest. ‘There was also, as we 
have been reminded, the school of Plutarch, wide in 
its scattering range, very comprehensive, thoroughly 
uncritical, open to believe anything and to fit every- 
thing into a loose scheme of things, provided it meant 
nothing in particular and could be transformed by 
allegory or symbol into anything the mood required. 
Yet, especially here, we must not forget what Mr 
Bernard Bosanquet pointed out,! that in this Alex- 
andrine age, among these philosophies of quotation— 
*‘ the successors who did not inquire concerning truth, 
but were overawed by the character of their teachers 
and the strangeness of their words and counted true 
each what his master taught him,” gentler virtues 
began to find a place among men’s ideals. ‘There is 
more tolerance for opinion, less prejudice about race 
(in spite of all that was said above, but without con- 
tradicting it), more disinterested kindliness for people, 
more sympathy for slave and captive and woman, more 
love of birds and flowers. “Il am a man; nothing 
human can I count alien to me!” ‘Terence’s famous 
saying went to the hearts of men, and the solider 
teaching of the Stoics gave it a philosophic warrant, 
showed it congenial to the universe, and inculcated it 
in every philosophic letter and discourse. Virgil had 
written and died before Paul was born; and when- 
ever we think of “‘ that hard Roman world,” of which 
a modern poet has spoken, which Tacitus drew so 
cleverly and Juvenal lashed with epigrams, we have 
to remember it was the world of Virgil, and that it 
loved Virgil. ‘There is much in the famous saying of 
Sainte-Beuve: “la venue méme du Christ n’a rien qui 
étonne quand on a lu Virgile.”’ 3 


1 History of Aesthetic, Chap. V. 

2 Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, 2. 

* Etude sur Virgile, p.68; Warde Fowler, Religious Experience of 
Roman People, p. 404, and the great W. Y. Sellar, Virgi/, p. 371, have 


much the same view. 


142 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Paul wrote once that the Law was the pazdagégos, 
the trusted slave, whose duty it was to take the child 
to school, and that in that character it was intended 
to bring Israel to Christ. He recognized no such 
function in the poetry and philosophy of Greece— 
surely a testimony to the truth of the view that he 
had not been trained in them. But a century later 
Clement of Alexandria, most learned, genial, dis- 
cursive and lovable of Christians, caught up his phrase 
and balanced it in a memorable sentence—that as the 
Law was the patdagégos to bring the Jews to Christ, so 
was Philosophy the pazdagégos of the Greeks.} 

Thus government, society, religious interchange, 
the development of individual self-consciousness, travel, 
intercourse, and philosophy were all combining to 
make the world one, to teach a more genuine humanism, 
and, as Paul and his followers saw, to open the door 
everywhere for a faith that should be one and universal. 


1Cf. Conflict of Religions in Early Roman Empire, pp. 275-93 
Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis, i. 28. 


Cuarpter VII 
HE CHURCH 


Tue earliest known form of association for religious 
purposes is that of the tribe or community ; and it is 
remarked as a new feature in the history of religion 
when the element of personal choice becomes a factor. 
In the great Homeric poems there is no question but 
that all members of a tribe were adherents of its 
religion. But in the Homeric hymn to Demeter the 
individual is conspicuous—it is his affair whether he 
is initiated in the rites of Demeter, and his personal 
happiness beyond the grave depends on whether he 
will or will not accept this opportunity. When the 
Athenian State—one’s language must not be too precise 
at this point—took over the general management or 
reorganization of the mysteries of Eleusis, instead of 
the old principle of birthright membership the new 
one of initiation was recognized; the mysteries, as 
Isocrates says, were opened in a spirit of liberality 
to mankind.1. A new conception of religious associa- 
tion was thus proclaimed, personal and international 
rather than tribal. ‘The date of the change is not 
to be precisely fixed. The period is that in which, 
after centuries apparently of confusion, whose history 
is lost to us, Greek literature springs to life again, 
personal and autobiographical, and proclaims for all 
time the new age in which—at all events where Greek 
thought rules—the individual is more and more the 
centre of real life. We need not follow the progress 
of the voluntary religious society in the Greek and 
Hellenistic world. The idea of a group, large or 

1F. B. Jevons, Inztr. History of Religion, pp. 358-9; Isocrates, 


Panegyricus, 28. 
143 


144 PAUL OF TARSUS 


small, local or international, composed of individuals 
drawn to a particular cult for whatever reason, though 
not to the exclusion of other cults, was familiar far 
and wide. In the age of Paul perhaps the most vital 
and real religious life that the Graeco-Roman world 
has to show was in these various societies.1 ‘The 
tribal gods and the city gods remained ; their emblems 
were still on the coins ; the old gods and goddesses kept 
a great place in tradition and in popular regard till 
paganism fell. But their re-inforcement among more 
religious groups by these gods of wider range and more 
personal appeal was a real step forward in the develop- 
ment of thought. 

Judaism differed, as we all know, from the other 
religions of the ancient world, and in various ways. 
Monotheism, when really alive, never has any toler- 
ance for polytheism with its idolatry and its general 
loose thinking. Judaism excluded all gods except 
Jehovah, and with time grew more and more clear that 
they did not exist; they were figments, or at best 
fallen angels, dolls or devils, mot gods at all. Judaism 
was and remained national; the proselyte more or less 
sank his nationality and became a Hebrew, as the 
irritation of the Gentile critic shows; why should 
he live like a Jew? In spite of Pharisee endeavours 
to secure proselytes, this ambition died away after the 
destruction of Jerusalem in a.p. 70, and the Gentiles 
were more and more avowedly left to any fate that God 
might care to assign to them ; it was His affair, perhaps 
He would destroy them,? perhaps He would not. 


1 Reitzenstein, He/l/. Myst. Relig., p. 94, goes so far as to suggest 
that the whole conception of a “ Church” is not Hellenistic. ‘The 
suggestion is valuable, as it reminds us that the association of the earliest 
Christians inside Judaism was perhaps as loose as that of the Pharisees 
or any other group. Separation meant a new emphasis on organization. 

2 See pp. 239, 240; passages from 4 Ezra, to which may be added 
4 Ezra xiii, 38. 

* Cf. Philo, de opific. mundi, 61; Abrahams, Pharisaism and the 
Gospels, pp. 141, 149. 


THE CHURCH 145 


If the analysis, attempted in the preceding pages, be 
right, Paul’s early uneasiness about a universal religion, 
with its corollary of Israel’s final loss or cession of 
privilege and status, will help us to understand his 
constant surprise at the wonderful secret of God, 
“hidden from ages and from generations but now 
made manifest to His saints,” 1 ‘‘ which none of this 
world’s rulers knew ” 2—the calling of the Gentiles. 
It is more explicitly put in Ephesians 3—“ it was in 
other ages not made known unto the sons of men, as 
it is now revealed unto his holy apostles and prophets 
by the Spirit, that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs 
and of the same body, and partakers of his promise 
in Christ by the gospel.” Whatever be decided about 
the authorship of that Epistle, in whole or in part, 
whatever the share of amanuensis or disciple, that idea 
is centrally Pauline. Paul’s life was re-made by the 
conviction that Christ’s death was a prelude of °° peace 
to you who were afar off, and to them that were nigh.” 4 

Paul was more conscious than most men of the need 
of the world, and more stirred than most Jews by the 
problem of the relation of this need to God. It 
seems that the Jews were in general content to do 
little for the moral cleansing of mankind, whatever 
be the historical basis for Mr Montefiore’s assertion of 
their ‘‘ most exquisite and delicate charity.” In the 
first chapter of the letter to the Romans, Paul draws 
his dreadful picture of the heathen world. He would 
not need to be told, as some modern students are eager 
to tell him, that not all Gentiles were filled with all 
unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, and so forth: ® 
Paul knew so much. But we have to bear in mind two 
things—first that Paul took a more serious view of 


1 Col. i. 26. Si Corait6s.\) fF pbs dih by. Oru a be pmedhe toe 

6 Deissmann, Pau/, p. 45, warns us against relying too much on 
ancient literature in support of a universal charge of degeneracy. Even 
Tacitus (Histories, i. 3) admits that the age he describes produced some 
high examples of virtue. 


K 


146 PAUL OF TARSUS 


evil than most people and had found even with “ the 
advantages of the Jew ” that righteousness in the fullest 
sense is an impossible task. ‘‘’There is none righteous, 
no, not one,” the psalmist had written, and Paul’s 
experience confirmed that psalmist.1_ Nor must we 
forget that in a heathen world much is done openly 
that in a Christian society, even in a society imperfectly 
leavened with Christian ideas, is not done at all and 
is counted unnatural. Plato’s dialogues show the 
freedom taken in certain relations now considered 
pathological. Nor must we forget the prevalence of 
slavery, with its actual horrors of cruelty, mutilation, 
and crucifixion, and its implicit negation of freedom, 
sex, and humanity. More important still, for our 
present purpose and generally, it is to recall that Paul 
traces all the filth and moral degeneracy of the world 
to one central cause—the lie at the heart of all pagan 
life—the false view of God. ‘They did not think fit 
to recognize God, so God “ gave them up ” to what 
they preferred—uncleanness, violation of nature, a 
reprobate mind.? 

The Gentile world was not unaware of a deluge of 
lawlessness that had broken over mankind, and there 
were many at work to try to help the world. Augustus 
had set an example that emperors might fitfully follow. 
Stoics and other popular lecturers, like Dio Chrysostom 
(a little later than Paul), preached reformation and 
self-government. After the fall of Nero, there is 
evidence that the world grew more sober and well- 
conducted under Vespasian and the great emperors 
who followed Domitian. The world believed in 
moral endeavour; but Paul, who had tried it too, 
realized that motive and change of nature were much 
more difficult problems than ordinary people guessed. 
It was one ground of his happiness in Christ that in 

1 Rom. lil. 10; Psalm xiv. 3. 2 See Chap. IV., p. 83. 

* See Merivale, History of the Romans, Chap. LXIV., vol. viii, 
p- 71. 


THE CHURCH 147 


him Paul believed the power of God was revealed for 
the Greek as well as for the Jew.1. He was entrusted 
—and it was with joy that he realized it and spoke it— 
with the good news for the non-Jewish world ;? he 
was the “apostle of the Gentiles,” a ministry which 
he ‘‘ magnified.” 8 
We have tried already to trace the course of his 
thoughts about the Gentile world, his early acquaint- 
ance, his lingering uncertainty, and at a later point the 
growth of his natural friendliness to Gentiles. We 
do not read of his having, like Peter, to overcome a 
taboo or some dim traditional dislike that attached to 
eating with Gentiles. Perhaps he had it to begin 
with, and in Christ it passed away, as race-prejudice 
must. He liked men; and, as others have done, he 
found that human beings were generally very much 
alike —— human, and also (what has escaped some 
observers) fundamentally spiritual. He would have 
accepted Augustine’s saying, ‘‘ Thou hast made us for 
Thyself, and the heart knows no rest till it rests in 
Thee.” 4 Finding God and man so naturally congenial 
to each other, he felt, as is easy to see, an intense joy 
in God as the Author of the larger design, the salvation 
of all men rather than the choice of a single people. 
Hence the satisfaction of being the chosen agent, by 
whom that larger design was being brought about. 
He was not the inaugurator of the mission to the 

Gentiles, as the records of Philip and Peter plainly 
show. ‘That the Cyprian and Cyrenian Jews, scattered 
by the persecution in which Stephen was killed, who 
went as far as Antioch and preached to “ Hellenists,”’ 
also addressed Gentiles, seems to follow from the marked 
antithesis in the Greek; but the exact sequence of 
events is not brought out by Luke.® As the story 
develops, Paul becomes more and more the repre- 

2 y Cor.i..24. 2 Gal. 11. 7. 

* Rom. xi. 133; cf. Rom. xv. 15-24. 

4 Augustine, Confessions, i. 1, I. 5 Acts xi. 19-26. 


148 PAUL OF TARSUS 


sentative and protagonist of the Gentile mission, the 
centre of the controversy. Professor Percy Gardner 
asks what would have happened if the Jerusalem 
apostles had condemned his mission.1_ One may guess 
with him that very much the same would have happened 
as did occur at Antioch when Peter trimmed in the 
matter of eating with Gentiles, and that Paul would 
have gone on. He would not have emphasized to the 
Galatians the fact that he did not get his gospel from 
man but by revelation from Jesus Christ, if he had not 
meant them—and all others whom it might concern 
to know his plans—to realize that he was not resting 
on “ pillars,” but on Christ, whom he proposed to 
obey. Happily, the apostles at Jerusalem did not 
condemn him—strange as it must have been to them 
to learn from this late-comer the real universalism of 
their Master’s teaching. The “regions beyond” 
meant after all no extension of their Master’s mind, no 
departure from it, but were his real meaning. ‘The 
recognition which they gave to Paul’s conception of 
Christ’s purposes was one fruit of Paul’s work, but 
its wider significance must not be lost, when we try 
in our turn to recapture and to interpret the historical 
Jesus. If Jesus had been as Jewish as we are some- 
times asked to believe, it is not likely that they would 
have recognized the Gentile side of the Church as 
they did. If we are to deal in what grammarians used 
to call “‘ impossible conditions in past time,” we might 
add another apodosis to our protasis, and say that Paul 
would not as a Pharisee have seen so much to quarrel 
with in the Christians, and so forth. But Paul’s 
insight and the action of the apostles at Jerusalem 
confirm the larger interpretation of Jesus: and they 
encourage us to think better of the older apostles and 
their group than some scholars would allow. 

When we come to the actual churches established 


*P. Gardner, Religious Experience of St Paul, p. 49. See Kirsopp 
Lake, Earlier Epistles, pp. 30, 48, etc. 


THE CHURCH 149 


among the Gentiles, we are at once faced with dis- 
appointment. ‘The drawbacks of a heathen inheritance 
are not easily realized in a land where Christian ideals 
have at least been held up to individuals and to society 
for a thousand years and more.1 “‘ What advantage 
had the Jew? Much, every way!” ‘This was true. 
And the Church, drawing from the lowliest walks 
of life in Hellenistic towns—slaves, small craftsmen, 
small tradesmen, the illiterate and ignorant, the 
classes of petty outlooks, petty ambitions and petty 
souls—was handicapped by their want of background. 
The English public school has been criticized for its 
pagan ideals—honour, self-government, self-effacement, 
esprit de corps; if they are pagan, how Paul would have 
welcomed such pagans! His pagans had all these 
great Stoic virtues to learn, and they had badly-trained 
minds into the bargain. ‘They came from the class 
that believed in all the charlatans of the market-place, 
the quacks who for a copper coin or two would “ drive 
devils out of men, and blow away diseases, and call up 
the souls of heroes, and display sumptuous banquets, 
and tables and sweetmeats and dainties that are not 
there,” the impostors with whom Celsus compared 
Jesus.2 ‘Tertullian and Lucian both speak of these 
adventurers; and Marcus Aurelius records his 
gratitude to Diognetos for teaching him to pay no 
attention to such people.? Some of Paul’s converts 
no doubt did confuse Jesus with these miracle-workers 
of the streets. How should they not, with their 
antecedents and lack of training ? and how should not 
modern converts from primitive peoples do the same ? 
Was the enormous mass of magical books burnt at 


Ephesus * the property of Paul’s adherents or of his 


1 See Campbell Moody, The Heathen Heart, an illuminating and 
sympathetic work on this subject—in many ways as valuable to the 
student of the early Church as Reitzenstein. 

2 Celsus, quoted by Origen, coutra Ce/sum, i. 68. 

8 M. Aurelius, i. 6. * Acts xix. 1g. 


150 PAUL OF TARSUS 


opponents ? ‘The question needs no answer, and the 
episode shows the mind and outlook of the people on 
whom he had largely todepend. We have to remember 
that astrology and devil-driving (with its fumigations 
and incantations) are the ancestors of Astronomy and 
Chemistry, and might claim—as astrology did—to be 
ranked as legitimate science and not as superstition. It 
is not necessary to read far into Plutarch’s Moralia to 
see the line of defence; or, if the books of Plutarch 
are too remote, some of Mrs Annie Besant’s writings 
may serve equally well. 

Magic has never been a matter of merely intellectual 
confusion; it has always carried with it practical 
imposture, and constantly the business of love philtres 
and poisons. But heathenism, even apart from these, 
implies low standards of morality, and here other 
evidence must be sought than that of educated Chinese 
and Indian students, who are not typical of the 
ordinary life of their countries, and who are apt to be 
on the defensive, and not unskilful at it.1 However, 
not to range into modern controversy, the character 
of Paul’s converts can be read in his letters to the 
Corinthians, for Paul was not invited, in the name of a 
hypothetical charity, as we sometimes are, to mince 
matters. He told his converts quite directly, for all 
his kindness and tact, what they had been and what 
they were. ‘There was moral squalor and immorality 
among them; there were quarrels very carnal, even 
though they called them spiritual ; there were cliques 
and lawsuits. ‘Their disregard of ordinary conventions, 
decencies and courtesies they perhaps supposed to be 
Christian freedom, as others have since; but Paul 
classed it as bad manners, tactlessness,? and folly. Why 
should a Christian woman discard a veil, in a town 


2 bee p. 136, 

* Cf. r Cor. x. 32, “ Give no offence, to Jews or Gentiles or the 
Church of God, as I try to please all men in every way, not for my 
good, but for theirs.” 


THE CHURCH I51 


where decent women did not, and where indecent 
women swarmed about temple and docks? “ All 
things are lawful, but not all expedient.”1 Why 
could they not behave like ordinary people ?—the 
bitter cry of Euripides four centuries earlier, when he 
looked at emancipated ladies. On a great many scores 
—“J praise you not!” 2 That he quotes both to 
the Romans and to the Corinthians a maxim from the 
Septuagint version of Proverbs, shows how clearly 
it was a rule of his own, a hint often in his mind: 
‘Provide things honest before the Lord and before 
men.” Why should their good be evil spoken of ? 4 

Tactlessness, inattention to decorum, a crude display 
of freedom, meant, to Paul’s mind, failure to interest 
and to hold those to whom the Christian was definitely 
sent by Christ. It might also mean a bad name for 
the community—as in the matter of veils—and perhaps 
eventually danger and persecution. But, beside risks 
from outside and failure in winning recruits, there 
were dangers within the church. 

The first great danger was Judaism, the story of 
which is written in Galatians and Acts. In essence, 
the controversy came to this—was the religion that 
centred in Jesus Christ to be a sect of Judaism? ‘To 
be a follower of Christ, must a man accept the law of 
Moses, and circumcision with it, and the food-laws 
of the Jews? In short, was it true, as Jews had taught, 
that outside Israel there was no salvation, or next 
to none? ‘There is evidence for a more liberal view 
in Judaism, which read a spiritual meaning into 
circumcision. /But Philo, while accepting the allegory 
and admitting that ‘‘ the circumcision signifies the 
cutting away of every passion and lust, and the destruc- 
tion of all godless thoughts,” held that ‘‘ we still are 
not justified in departing from the law of circumcision 
laid upon us,” and similarly that Sabbath and festival 


Pore. 29 2 Cor. xi. 22. 
® Rom. xil. 17; 2 Cor. vili. 213 Prov. il. 4. * Rom. xiv. 16. 


152 PAUL OF TARSUS 


were also to be kept in the letter as well as in the spirit. 
The Sibylline oracles (so-called) promised the Messianic 
Kingdom to Gentiles who accepted the true God, 
forsook idols, murder, theft, and sexual uncleanness, 
lived a good life and were baptized, but nothing was 
said here of circumcision.? Still the point was urged 
by Jews and Judaizers that a convert from the Gentile 
world accepted Christ and Moses together. ‘“‘ Certain 
men which came down from Judaea [to Antioch] taught 
the brethren, and said, ‘Except ye be circumcised 
after the manner of Moses, ye cannot be saved.’’’’ 
The story goes on, how Paul and Barnabas had no small 
contention and dispute with them, how the matter 
was referred to Jerusalem, and how there also “ there 
rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which 
believed, saying that it was needful to circumcise them 
and to command them to keep the law of Moses.” 
The discussion in Jerusalem it is not necessary for us 
to follow, nor the controversy as to what precisely 
happened, the enactment or recommendation and its 
outcome in detail. Professor Lake * accepts the view 
that the reference to “things strangled” is a gloss 
on the original text and that the threefold require- 
ment that Gentile converts should “ abstain from things 
offered to idols, from blood [1.e., murder] and from 
fornication’? was no compromise, but an acceptance 
of the Antioch party’s position, and a release given to 
Gentile Christians. Even if we are to retain the 
reference to “things strangled,” and however we 
solve the historical problems that rise, the fact remains 
that Jerusalem decided against circumcision, and b 

the decision cut off the recruitment of Judaism by the 
proselytes who had felt the attraction of Jewish mono- 
theism, Jewish ethics, and the Jewish eschatological 


1'Philo, De Migratione Abrahami, quoted by K. Lake, Larlier 
Epistles of St Paul, p. 24. 

2 Oracula Sibyllina, 1V., 24 f., 162 ff. ® Acts. xv. 1 ff. 

“See Lake, Earlier Epistles, pp. $1 ff. 


THE CHURCH FS nee 


hope. From now onward the appeal of Christianity 
was distinct, and it was more attractive, it offered all 
that Judaism could offer, and a freedom that Judaism 
could not give. 

Luke, in the Acts, ascribes to Peter a leading part in 
the movement and in the defence, and, in spite of his 
fluctuation and uneasy retreat at Antioch, Paul, in the 
letter to the Galatians, implies that Peter belonged to 
the liberal side and acted generally with them. But 
it is fairly clear that, in the common judgment, it was 
Paul and not Peter who was the leader in the Gentile 
mission. Whoever, however many, had begun the 
work among Gentiles, the great campaigns of Paul, 
the tremendous arguments all over the Hellenistic 
world of Asia Minor, Macedon, and Greece, the fury 
of the local Jews in every place when he appealed 
to the Gentiles and won—all this made it plain who 
was the centre of the disturbance and the great menace 
to the existence of Judaism. ‘‘ Z/1s is the man who 
teaches all men everywhere against the People and 
the Law and this place.” A variant reading in the 
Acts attributes to the mob at Jerusalem the cry, 
** Away with our enemy.” It was Time’s revenges 
indeed when the Jews of Asia Minor brought against 
Paul the very charges which the Cilicians and he had 
laid against Stephen.? 

It is perhaps possible to trace some progress in Paul’s 
ideas in the matter. The acceptance of Christ need 
not at first have implied the superfluity of circumcision ; 
Trypho, in the dialogue with Justin, asks whether a 
man may not keep the law of Moses as well as follow 
Christ,? and I have heard the same question asked in 
English Cambridge. Paul, in his endeavour to be “ all 
things to all men,” may have gone further on some 
occasions than at other times he thought well. Luke 
says that Paul got Timothy circumcised—Timothy, 


1 Acts xxi. 28. 2 Acts vi. 13. 
® Justin, Dialogue with Trypho, Chaps. XLVI. XLVII. 


154 PAUL OF TARSUS 


being the son of a Jewish mother and a father who was 
Greek enough to be called Greek, a Gentile! But 
Titus, later on, who was a Greek, Paul says, neither 
Paul himself nor the Jerusalem group suggested should 
be circumcised.? 

When the storm broke in the churches of Galatia— 
of South Galatia, as we must now think,® the Antioch, 
Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe of the missionary journeys 
—Paul is confronted by the undoing of his whole 
work, the capture of some of his converts by a sort of 
bastard Christianity, the utter relapse into paganism 
of others, and he writes his Epistle. ‘The letter bears 
the marks of haste. Probably the admission made by 
Theodore Roosevelt’s friends, when it was suggested 
that Roosevelt had been in a hurry while writing a 
particular volume, would be true of Paul— He always 
was.” But there are degrees of hurry, and there is 
nothing like the sweep and rush in Philippians, for 
instance, that we find in Galatians. ‘This time the 
issue was thought out to the end and made plain through 
and through with uncompromising vigour. No doubt 
the writing of it clarified Paul’s own thought; it lifted 
the whole controversy forward and really settled it.4 
The Law and Christ are shown in sharp contrast as 
irreconcilable alternatives; it is to be “ either or”; 
and Paul’s passionate concentration of everything in 
Christ was a declaration from which the Church could 
never recede, whatever the human weakness of wishing 
to be on both sides may at times have prompted. 
The Law? ‘I am dead to the law! I am crucified 
with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I, but Christ 
liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh 
I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me 
and gave himself for me.” “In Jesus Christ neither 


1 Acts xvi. 3. * Gal. ines, 

® We must recognize the work here of Sir William M. Ramsay. 

‘Coming probably between the enlistment of ‘Timothy and of 
Titus, it may explain the difference of action. 


THE CHORCH 155 


circumcision avails anything nor uncircumcision.” 
‘God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified 
unto me, and I unto the world.” “The preaching 
of the cross is to them that perish foolishness . . . 
unto the Jews a stumblingblock. . . . And I deter- 
mined not to know anything among you, save Jesus 
Christ, and him crucified.” 4 

It has been held that Paul makes no reference to a 
Judaizing party at Corinth, unless, as Professor B. W. 
Bacon suggests, it consisted of those who boasted, “‘ I 
am of Christ ’—on the supposition that, as Christ 
apparently kept the Law, they would. The explanation 
is attractive. ‘The Epistle to the Galatians did not 
abolish the party; it lived on, and in later days its 
descendants produced an anti-Pauline literature. But 
the air was cleared, when the question was put once 
and for ever: if Christ does all, what can circum- 
cision add? Forced into a new explicitness, Paul was 
explicit. When genius has decided a case, its judg- 
ment is hard for duller, shallower or timider people 
to reverse. From this time onward a new line of 
interpretation had to be applied to the Old Testament ; 
the literal law of commandments being abrogated, the 
allegorical use of proof-texts, types and shadows began ; 
freedom was achieved, Christ was made central, and 
Jewish lawgiver and prophets became his heralds, and 
nothing more. The Scriptures were kept, to the 
great gain of mankind; the new religion had a his- 
torical background; and, though the method used 
was not a sound one, the supremacy of Christ was 
enhanced. 

Antithetical to Jewish legalism was an antino- 
mianism that parodied Christian freedom—the view, 


Beeaacri dg, 205 )¥..0 + vi..¥53 0 Cor i. 18,233, 0.92. 

*See K. Lake, Landmarks of Early Christianity, p. 70, for the 
effects of this. Also Conflict of Religions in Early Roman Empire, 
Chap. VI. 


156 PAUL OF TARSUS 
supported by the analogy of Greek mystery religions, 


that when once a man’s peace—or a woman’s, for 
the prostitutes held by Isis and Cybele—was made 
with heaven, there was a new licence for conduct, for 
enjoyment without restraint and without the fear of 
guilt. ‘There were other baptisms in the world, why 
should not Christian baptism be treated like the rest 
as an opus operatum?1 ‘This magical view was to 
have a long life in the church. In the meantime Paul 
had to say, what the priests of Cybele and Isis did not 
feel so bound to say, that fornication was the breaking 
of God’s law and was also disloyalty to Christ. Paul 
does not debate the relations of matter and spirit, the 
irrelevance of the two worlds to each other, spiritual 
to material. He brought his strong Jewish sense, 
inspired by his knowledge of Christ, to bear on Gentile 
filthiness ; and once more we realize the value of a life 
and a mind centred in Christ. Greeks were very 
clever at argument—especially the cheaper type 
of Greek, like the cheaper types of the emanci- 
pated everywhere; but “‘ye have not so learned 
Christ.?7'4 

Paul had to deal with all sorts of crotchets, the 
connexion of which with religion and morals was not 
always obvious. ‘There was astrology with its ‘ weak 
and beggarly elements,” the observance of ‘‘ days and 
months and times and years.” ‘There were curious 
“* genealogies ”? 4—schemes of principalities and powers, 
pléroma and other neuter nouns or abstracts personalized 
into something like deity, so vague as to be mysterious 
and imposing. ‘There were dreams and fancies with 
more than a superficial likeness to modern theosophies ; 


1Cf. K. Lake, Earlier Epistles, p. 46. 2 Eph. iv. 20. 

® Gal. iv. 9, 10; the Galatian days, etc., may have been Jewish, 
but the “elements”? seem more pagan, or at least more like the 
generally current sham science of the day; cf. Col. il. 8, xara ra 
OTOLYELA TOU KOT LOD. 

“19/1. 2.45 


THE CHURCH 157 


the theosophists at least hail the affinity. A century 
Jater more was heard of all these things, and it is hard 
for a modern man, trained on any strict lines of history 
and science, to understand how anybody could ever 
have attached any idea of reality to any of them.! 
There was religious vegetarianism—not the harmless 
dietetic vagary of to-day, but a vegetarianism based on 
a half-belief in the transmigration of souls, and on 
the fear that with fleshmeat the soul of the beast may 
pass into the man. ‘There was a similar dread or 
dislike of marriage, again an idea not unconnected with 
daemon-fears, and the antithesis of body and spirit. 
With the last Paul clearly had some sympathy.? But 
in all these cases, he hits the right line, and it is his 
feeling for Christ that guides him. Men and women 
are, of course, free to marry; Paul does not marry, 
and he thinks it wiser to abstain from marriage, ‘‘ as 
things are ”’—perhaps because the Second Advent may 
be near, perhaps because of trouble in the flesh. In 
any case, his treatment of the marriage problem in 
reply to the questions of the Corinthians is marked by 
sense and humanity. Christianity 1s mot celibacy ; 
marriage, like meats, 1s God’s device “ to be received 
with thanksgiving.” ® As for theosophy, and every 
other notion of the ill-trained or ill-balanced mind, 
Paul proceeds instinctively less by negation than by 
affirmation. If men once get their affections centred 
in Christ, their minds at work on the ideas of Christ, 
“ their thoughts into obedience to the law of Christ ” 4 
—or, if all that is too hard and abstract, if they will 
be content to live ‘ along the lines of Christ ” 5 and 
have Christ dwelling in their hearts by love—you may 


1 A very short time with an English translation of Pistis Sophia will 
suffice. 

2 1 Cor. vii. 1-8. 

8 See generally 1 Cor. vi., vii., and cf. 1 Tim. iv. 3, a Pauline senti- 
ment, whoever was the author, redactor, or editor. 

SPER Xe Ss 6 Col. ii. 8.; Rom. xv. 5. 


158 PAUL OF TARSUS 


trust to their judgment; the magnet will swing to the 
North, if you leave it alone. ‘This may be writing out 
the guidance of the Holy Spirit in very simple terms and 
and plain language, but it was plain language that was 
wanted and Paul gave it. No one could mistake his 
emphasis on Christ, and the test question—how such 
and such conduct or ideas fitted Christ (kara Xpiorov) } 
—anybody could understand. 

Another group in the early church remains to be 
considered, the people who “spoke with tongues” 
and were amenable to “ the spirit,” and the prophets 
generally. From the first advent of Dionysos to Greece 
down to John Wesley’s preaching at Kingswood, and 
indeed later, men have been confused and perplexed by 
psychical phaenomena which cross the work of religion. 
A man is deeply moved to contrition or to acceptance 
of Christ, a movement primarily of the mind, stirred 
by thought and emotion; and then something else 
breaks in, and he falls in trance, as John Wesley’s 
hearers sometimes did. Or else, whether he loses 
control of his speech or gains control of another tongue, 
he begins to give utterance to sounds unfamiliar. 
This, to people who have never seen it before and 
whose psychology is very simple, is a perplexing thing 
to explain, and they fall back on the hypothesis of 
the intervention of a spirit. But even so the critics 
retain some hold of canons which they know better— 
if the person “ possessed ” is blasphemous for instance, 
it is an evil spirit ; otherwise it may be the Holy Spirit. 
There is evidence of an outcrop of such phaenomena 
in Corinth, and it is held that everything was being 
sacrificed to secure manifestations of prophecy and 
speech “ with tongues.” Paul intervened. He was 
not in possession of modern views of psychology, but 
he had sense, and he was practical. What was being 
effected by all this to win men for Christ ? Did the 
unintelligible confusion of spirit-filled gatherings 

a Ool sais. 


THE CHURCH 159 


clarify the appeal of Christ ? Was it consonant with 
the gospel or with the Holy Spirit, when a man 
under the influence of some spirit announced that 
*¢ Jesus was accursed” ?4 He owns that he also spoke 
with tongues 2—a confession to which we must return 
later; but, he asks, what is the real use of it? He 
puts in the plea of edification—the real plea of getting 
some foundation laid on which life can be built, 
centred as ever in Christ ; and the spiritual occurrences 
begin to look very irrelevant. The “‘ tongues ” might 
be the “ tongues of angels ” 3 (he does not admit this), 
but in any case love is more significant. However 
mystical in temperament or in mind Paul might be, 
he could not forget the work to which he was called. 
Christ was to control his thoughts, and Christ did. 
These confusing phaenomena are not in the gospel— 
nor, we may note, in the Gospels; they came from the 
heathen world, not the Jewish. ‘They were irrelevant 
to the real work of the church; that was their con- 
demnation. Modern psychology confirms it by show- 
ing their more or less physical origin, their wide 
diffusion among races of lower culture, and their 
growing rarity with the growth of inhibition. Inhibi- 
tion has a scientific sound, “‘ the obedience of Christ ”’ 
a theological; but Paul and the men of science on 
different lines have reached the same conclusion, and 
the fact that they have gone on lines so different con- 
firms their conclusion. 

So soon in church history do we reach the problems 
of order, discipline, and regularization. ‘‘ Ye are 
called to freedom,” 4—and the next thing is church 
law‘! Paul is faced with the problem of every liberal 
government,—of Aristides and Pericles in the Athenian 
Confederacy, of Oliver Cromwell face to face with 
Lilburne and others, of Thomas Jefferson and his 
followers confronted with the Louisiana question. 


bea Cor, xi,. 3; 21 Cor. xiv. 18. See p. 186. 
8 x Cor. xii. I « Gal. v. 13. 


160 PAUL OF TARSUS 


The church is “a little self-governing republic ” 1— 
so much is obvious in the Corinthian story. Can a 
republic, with a real work to do, afford to be wrecked 
by a handful of people who recognize nothing but the 
impulse of the moment ? Must there be authority— 
the crux of every church ? Controversy has raged over 
the historical question of the authority in the apostolic 
church, but the balance of historical opinion is to the 
view, expressed by Professor Percy Gardner, that the 
organization was in “a perfectly fluid state.” Fifty 
years after Paul’s death (or a few years less) Ignatius 
has an opinion or a theory about bishops which we 
do not find in Paul, but even so it is not at all 
established that his theory (or whatever it be called) 
is on all fours with the dogma of Cyprian a cen- 
tury and a half later, or that either of them quite 
means what their supposed followers mean to-day. 
This is one case where, the word remaining the 
same, historical inquiry has to ascertain its implica- 
tion and its background at each stage. It is not 
needful in a study of Paul to go deeply into the 
controversy, and it will suffice to quote the summary 
of Bishop Henson. 

“Dr Lightfoot had shown that the traditional 
view of Episcopacy as an Apostolical institution must 
be revised in deference to the fact that it had been 
developed out of the Presbyterate. Dr C. H. Turner 
showed that the traditional view of Apostolic succession 
was not primitive but grew out of controversy in the 
fourth century. In neither case did the new theory 
necessarily prohibit the traditional view, but in both 
the traditional view was mitigated and stripped of its 
binding authority over religious minds. . . . [Professor 
A. C. Headlam] reaffirms the positions of Dr Lightfoot 
and Dr ‘Turner with learning, decision and lucidity 
. . . [and] reaches the conclusion that Episcopacy is 
an ecclesiastical creation, neither ordained by Christ 

1'T. M. Lindsay, Church and Ministry, p. 54. 


THE CHURCH 161 


nor appointed by His Apostles.” 1 Professor Henry 
Melville Gwatkin, of Cambridge, held the same posi- 
tion, and this agreement among outstanding Angli- 
can scholars may relieve us for the moment of closer 
argument. In any case neither episcopacy, bishops, 
presbyters, nor any other form or theory of church 
government can be said to have been central in Paul’s 
thoughts. 

The early church was very like the synagogue, as 
the New Testament shows us both. It could hardly 
have been otherwise, when it was really a group of 
seceders with the same tradition. ‘The procedure seems 
to have been fluid as well as the government—at 
Corinth too fluid altogether. That hymns—rhythms 
of some kind—were used we know from Pliny about 
111 a.p.2. The Apocalypse has fragments—or perhaps 
the whole—of some hymns.? Paul himself may have 
echoes of them.’ He nowhere mentions the use of the 
Lord’s prayer, but his reference to Abba, Father, is 
taken to imply it.6 Letters were read, and preaching 
abounded ; often many persons took part in it.® 

It is when we come to sacraments that we reach 
difficulty. Professor Lake tells us that ‘ baptism is, 
for St Paul and his readers, universally and unques- 
tioningly accepted as a ‘ mystery’ or sacrament which 
works ex opere operato, and from the unhesitating 
manner in which St Paul uses this fact as a basis for 
argument, as if it were a point on which Christian 
opinion did not vary, it would seem as though this 


1 Hensley Henson, Anglicanism, p. 192. 

2 Pliny, Epp. to Trajan, 96, 7; carmenque Christo quasi deo dicere 
secum invicem. ‘This passage, written by a Roman, a heathen and an 
outsider, cannot be made to serve as evidence for a belief in Christ’s 
deity in the Bithynian church. It merely explains the practice and the 
type of hymn. 

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Gal. iv. 6. 

St. § Ot, XIV, 29; 20, 20, 


% 


162 PAUL OF TARSUS 


sacramental teaching is central in the primitive Chris- 
tianity to which the Roman Empire began to be 
converted.” ‘The Catholic doctrine,” he says, “ is 
much more nearly primitive than the Protestant ;” 
*“ but,” he adds, “‘ the Catholic advocate in winning 
his case has proved still more: the type of doctrine 
which he defends is not only primitive, but pre- 
Christian.” ‘“* The majority of the Church . . . they 
all accepted Christianity as a Mystery Religion, which 
really could do what the other Mystery Religions 
pretended to do.” Dr Lake’s canon is that, to 
discover the central points in early Christian doctrine, 
we must look not at those to which Paul devotes pages 
of argument, but at those which he treats as the 
premises accepted by all Christians. Like all simple 
rules, this is not as simple as it looks. However, Dr 
Lake’s contentions, partly based on the work of 
Reitzenstein,? are supported, in some degree, by a 
good many scholars, while others who do not go so 
far show the influence of this line of inquiry. 

On the other hand a strong case is made against 
this likeness to the mystery religions,—even supposing 
that we really know as much as is supposed about 
those religions, the views they embodied and their 
diffusion. ‘That likeness there was later on, is evident 
enough, though the likeness even there does not take 
us very far. In the New Testament there is language 
which, taken by itself, is more or less susceptible of 
such interpretation, but there is far more that is not. 
Nobody so far has alleged that Jesus held any such 
position, and it is assumed that the change to another 
basis altogether from the standpoint of Jesus was the 
work of Paul as much as of any one; Paul thus becomes 
the man who has corrupted our religion and brought 
us away from Jesus. A man’s language is a guide to 


1 Lake, Earlier Letters of St Paul, pp. 385, 215, 233. 
2 Professor Lake, however, warns me that he has since found 
Reitzenstein’s quotations not too accurate. 


THE CHURCH 163 


his character, but his character is the background 
against which his language has to be interpreted. 
Paul was a Jew, and he lived first among the enemies 
of Jesus and then among his friends, and he is to be 
credited with some intelligence, some clearness, and 
some gift of centripetal emphasis. Can it be seriously 
urged that his emphasis, broad and long, is sacramental, 
when, as Reitzenstein admits, he never refers to his 
own baptism 1—when the sacrament is for him the 
Lord’s supper, and he does not use of it the language of 
the fourth gospel, never hints at “‘ eating the flesh and 
drinking the blood,” ? (which was in some instances 
the essence of the heathen mystery meal), never but in 
one doubtful place*® hints at “the belief in the 
marvellous virtue of sacred food, whether for weal or 
woe ”—when he never gets near a phrase like that of 
Ignatius, “‘ medicine of immortality and antidote of 
death ’—when in setting forth to the Romans his 
conception of Christianity, he mentions baptism once, 
and the Lord’s supper not at all—when he boasts for 
the moment to the Corinthians and thanks God that, 
one or two excepted, he had baptized none of them ? 
Is that the language of a sacramentalist, of Cyprian or 
of any modern disciple of Cyprian? Why is not the 
sacramental position made clearer in the epistle to the 
Hebrews and the Apocalypse and the letters:of St 
John—waiving the broad hint of the fourth evangelist 
that spirit and not flesh is what matters *—or in the 
Didache, or even the epistle of James? The Epicurean 
in Cicero’s book says; ‘“‘ When we call grain Ceres and 


1 Hell. Myst. Relig., p. 49. 

2H. A. A. Kennedy, Paul and Mystery Religions, p. 270. ‘The 
scholarship and the sanity of this book, and its author’s real acquaint- 
ance with Paul’s mind, put it in another class from Reitzenstein’s 
loose-hung work. 

8 Does he really mean that physical disease is the result of a thought- 
less sharing in the Lord’s supper, 1 Cor. xi. 30? Is that the only neces- 
sary interpretation? Does he nowhere else use metaphor or analogy? 

4 John vi. 63. 


164 PAUL OF TARSUS 


wine Liber, we just use a common style of speech, but 
do you think that anybody is so silly as to suppose that 
what he eats is God?” + ‘The commentator notes 
that no ancient enemy of the church brought this 
taunt against it. (What the Christians were accused 
of was eating real babies.) Clemen concludes that the 
Lord’s supper cannot be derived, even collaterally 
or by way of supplement, from pagan sources; and 
that the ideas in the New ‘Testament which are per- 
haps derived from non-Jewish sources lie on the fringe 
of Christianity and do not touch its vital essence.® 
But it is at the centre, not on the circumference, that 
the issue is to be decided. Paul may argue ad hominem 
on circumcision and baptism for the dead, but what 
are his central convictions? No one can read him for 
his own sake, or with Christ in mind, and miss them. 
“He that seeketh findeth ”—he finds what he seeks, 
as we know from the use of quotations and statistics. 
But grasp the whole man and understand him ; 
relevant or irrelevant, can he keep off Jesus Christ as 
a personality ?—Christ who gives him guidance and 
strength and everything, at night when he is by him- 
self (to judge from our records) as often as at any other 
time or in any other way, who is always for him the 
figure of glory seen at the Damascus gate; ‘* who 
loved me and gave himself for me.” Dr Lake is right 
enough about the pre-Christian origin, the pagan 
origin, of the mystery-religion view of the gospel, 
but Paul was a Jew who never lost his contempt for 
idols and all concerned with them.4 He was a man 
with a mind and a nature, too spontaneous to leave 
1 Cicero, de natura deorum, iil. 16, 41, see J. B. Mayor’s note. 


* Tertullian, Apology, 7, 8. 
® Clemen, Primitive Christianity and non-Fewish Sources, pp. 266, 


4'The view that Hinduism has contributions to make to the religion 
of Jesus is modern, and due to confusion of thought. Indians may very 
well illumine Christ for us, but idolatry and Hinduism are on a different 
footing in grammar and in fact. 


THE CHURCH 165 


any one in doubt as to what he thought most of, too 
fundamental, too clear to be the victim of fancies and 
magic, a man too genuine and too deep to miss what the 
Stoics and the Epicureans could see—and what his 
own Jews, taught by the prophets, saw perfectly well. 
Finally the Gospels remain to be explained: how they 
came to be what they are, if the products of a sacra- 
mentalist society, is not elucidated, and two of their 
writers were conspicuously in the Pauline circle. 
Whatever occasional expressions of Paul may suggest, 
the letters taken as a whole, the group so far as we know 
it from its works, the personality, the natural make 
of the man and his experience, suggest an outlook 
quite other than that of the mysteries. In a word, 
Reitzenstein and his followers may know more of the 
contemporary cults, but Luther knew Paul; for to 
share a man’s experience tells you more of him than the 
study of his contemporaries, especially if they live in 
another street. 

But the crotchets and scandals of the church, its 
constitution and its sacraments, even if we are never 
so sure of them, do not exhaust its description; they 
hardly touch its value, or its real nature. Before we 
leave the actual church to look at the ideal, we must 
come back to its members, and see what Paul has to 
say of them. A certain type of mind will be apt to 
discount the expressions of such a lover of men, and 
the criticism might be justified if it were not so clear 
in his writings that Paul had no illusions about his 
converts—“ not many wise, not many mighty, not 
many noble,” to quote no further. He tells the 
Philippian Christians, however, that they “ shine like 
beacons in the world;” 1 and the historian must at 
least concede this as to early Christians in general, on 
the evidence of Julian the Apostate,? if he will not 

1 Phil. ii. 15. | 

2 Julian, Letter xlix., resting on citation of it intact by Sozomen, 
Eccles. Hist., v. 16. 


166 PAUL OF TARSUS 


accept Paul’s. Even the Corinthians developed “ an 
insatiable passion for kindness.” +1 ‘The church bore 
down the opposition of the world by what used to be 
called holy living and holy dying. But the faculty 
for such life and death had not quite come by nature. 
Paul speaks to the Corinthians of fornicators, adulterers, 
sodomites, thieves, drunkards, slanderers, extortioners, 
and then he abruptly adds, with no hint of a feeling 
that anybody would gainsay it, “‘ And such were some 
of you.”? The world from which they came he 
pictures in the first chapter of the Epistle to the 
Romans, to which we need not recur. In that world 
the Christians had been “aliens from the common- 
wealth of Israel, strangers to the covenants of promise, 
without hope and without God in the universe,” * in 
slavery to gods that were not gods but impostors or 
impositions.4 But all that is changed; they have come 
to know God, or rather have been known by God—a 
characteristically Pauline correction. “ Beloved by 
God” they have been “‘ chosen by God.” ® Even the 
Corinthians, who had been so squalid—‘‘such were 
some of you, but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, 
but ye are justified in the name of our Lord Jesus and 
by the Spirit of our God.” 7? They are “ partakers of 
the inheritance of the saints in light . . . delivered 
from the power of darkness, translated into the kingdom 
of his dear Son, redeemed in his blood’”’;® once far 
off, they are made nigh by the blood of Christ; they 
are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens 
with the saints and of the household of God, built on 
the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus 
Christ himself being the chief corner-stone.® (The 


1 Clement of Rome, ad Cor., 2,2. ‘To quote the epistle is not to 
decide or rule out of court the questions raised by Prof. E. T. 
Merrill as to Clement of Rome, in his recent volume. 

4x Cor. vi. 11. 2 Eph. ii. 12,,10. “ Gal. iv. 8. 

PATOL AY: Dist Chalk Oils Alle £2 seis «1 Thess. tae 

Dh i Oe) Pep HG EH Cols inte te ® Eph. ii. 12, 19, 20. 


THE CHURCH 167 


absence of sacramental reference or tone in such passages 
may be noted in passing as very significant—still more 
if a pupil or amanuensis modelled or re-modelled the 
Ephesian epistle.) The foundation is Jesus Christ ; 
and the men, formerly stained with every mean and 
filthy vice, are the temple of God, and the spirit of God 
dwells in them. 

All of this is the actual, though it sounds ideal. But 
it has other features still more happy. Paul had three 
pictures for the church—the family, the human body, 
and the temple of God—every one of them implying a 
new unity in design with great diversity of function, 
many members of one body, all different but all one,? 
a unity of experience, a unity of purpose, a unity in the 
redeeming love of God. ‘The middle wall of partition 3 
a simile taken from the temple in Jerusalem—is gone ; 
there is love for all the saints,4 Greek, Eellenictial 
Jew, and barbarian. In fact, there are no longer Jews 
and Greeks at all; and the barbarians and Scythians 
have put on Christ and are transformed. ‘“* God’s 
secret ” is working out, visibly, in the actual. They 

e “all full of the Holy Spirit,” and their individual 
powers and capacities are laid hold of, vivified and 
strengthened by the Spirit, and it is seen how con- 
gruous and apt all mankind are to one another in 
Christ. 

In every epistle the ideal for believer and church 1s 
set forth, greater unity, higher character, more trained 
intelligence “‘ for the full knowledge of the mystery of 
Christ,” > “in full knowledge and all perception to 
distinguish the essential.” ® ‘They must conduct them- 
selves ‘‘ accurately ” (a rather Thucydidean adverb) and 

ay Cor. ii. rr, 16. 

a)See 1 Cor. xui.; Rom. xii. 4-8; Eph. iv. 11. 

3 Eph. ii. 143; cf. Deissmann, Light from Ancient East, pp. 74, 
75, with reproduction of the middle wall and its threat of death to 
the Gentile who passes it. 

scorers ii L hess... 3. 5 Coli: 2: 

* Phil. i. 9, 10; the phrase, or part of it, in Rom. ii. 18. 


168 PAUL OF TARSUS 


worthily of their calling, in love as Christ has loved us, 
and as children of light.1 ‘They should pay tribute, 
taxes and all other dues, bear the burdens of the weak 
and (what is often harder) tolerate their fancies. It 
is, as Benjamin Jowett put it, “‘the substitution of a 
conception of moral growth for the mechanical theory 
of habits. All is freedom, and Christ is the centre 
of it all; and he that hath begun a good work 
in you, Paul is confident, will perform it unto 
the day of Christ.” ‘‘ Let your hope be a joy to 
Ons 
‘ The more closely we study Paul’s conception of the 
church, the more clearly does it appear that he is 
not thinking of a reproduction of a cult-brotherhood, a 
thiasos,amystery-group. He is moving to larger, deeper 
and truer ideas—moving out of Judaism, purest of all 
existing group-religions, into a new world, all remade 
by Christ. He starts, whatever the question, with the 
glorious Christ, whom he saw first at the Damascus 
gate, whom he has tested in years of trying life in city 
after city of the Roman world, whom, with every 
fresh difficulty surmounted and every fresh adventure 
into the regions beyond, he has found more real. 
Christ is not a mythical mystery-god; Paul never 
dreamed of such a thing ; the historical Jesus belonged 
to another order. If we choose to find parallels, the 
contrasts are more patent, more numerous, more 
significant. ‘“‘ By their fruits ye shall know them,” 
and Paul finds fruits that the mystery religions never 
produced and did not think of producing in their 
atmosphere of cash and credulity; ‘‘ love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, 
temperance—against such there is no law.” % Nor 
for their production is there any law; they are the 
outcome of life related to a living centre of faith that 
works by love; personal products of a personal relation, 
WEP. Ys 155 1. 0s) Ve 85 h¥si 0s 
2 Rom. xii. 12 (Moffatt). * Gal. v. 22, 23; 


THE CHURCH 169 


free, and full of the spirit of growth and exploration. 
Such a spirit contemporary Judaism did not produce ; 
still less.did the friends of Plutarch and Apuleius ; “* but 
we have the mind of Christ,” said Paul,! and that was 
the real differentia. 


a I Cor. li. 16. 


Cuapter VIII 
THE HUMAN PAUL 


Ir is a biographer’s temptation, in working out the 
situations in which his hero (if that old-fashioned word 
is tolerable in this age of criticism) is placed, and the 
social and political forces to which he has to re-act, 
to lose sometimes the man himself. He will give us 
a picture, faithful enough, of the man’s mind and 
nature, and the story of his formative years or his 
decisive moment ; and yet he may forget to all appear- 
ance that in every scene of life, in every action, the 
man is there. He may forget that, unless in each scene 
and action the character which we have seen develop- 
ing is operative and in evidence, unless the great central 
ideas of the man are accounted for, there is a futility 
about the biographer’s work, and he has missed his 
real target. It is hard to conceive of a case where the 
authentic man is more certainly and definitely the 
whole story, than when we are concerned with Paul 
of Tarsus. Our present affair is not biography, nor a 
record of travel, but portraiture, and in every chapter 
the first thing must be the portrait. Something of his 
character should have been gathered at every stage ; 
at this point it must be our endeavour to collect what 
we have gathered, and to combine it, in the hope of 
realizing more clearly the type of man which he repre- 
sented, and (if it be not foolish to suggest it) would in 
some degree have represented if he had never been a 
Christian or even a Jew at all. The man is made by 
his native endowment and by his experience. Every 
impulse, every feeling, every unconscious motion of 


mind or frame, is affected by the experience. But 
170 


THE HUMAN PAUL 171 


the experience is interpreted, and in a sense made, 
by the reaction to it, and while it cannot be overlooked, 
there is something to be said for even an imperfect 
analysis of the man’s nature, an attempt to see what 
impulses, what feelings, what unconscious forces 
moved and worked in the man who underwent so 
striking an experience, who was “‘ apprehended of Christ 
Peaue.]: + 

‘There are great men who, through no fault of their 
own, are elusive. It is a great deal easier to know the 
character of Plato than that of Aristotle, to be at home 
with Luther than with Calvin. Cicero, Charles Lamb, 
Horace, Augustine, reveal themselves; and so does 
Paul. The difficulty in Paul for the modern student 
is not to seize the traits of his character, our present 
concern, but to realize how the whole man is 
possessed by Christ. Vivacity, passion, friendship 
many of us can in measure understand ; the heart-whole 
surrender, conviction, and fusion, that make Paul, lie 
too often outside our experience, and we are apt to 
leave them out of our picture or draw them amiss. Mr 
A. C. Bradley, in one of his Oxford lectures, said that 
‘always we get most from the genius in a man of 
genius and not from the rest of him.” 2 How easy it 
is, when one has not genius, to overlook it in the man 
who has it and to find him very like ordinary men ! 

There survives from antiquity a work to which 
scholars tend to assign a much higher historical value 
than it was once allowed—The Acts of Paul and Thekla.® 
It exists in Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Armenian. Of 
these Mr F. C. Conybeare tells us that the Greek text 
is the worst; the Latin is better, but not so good as 
the Syriac; but the Armenian text, though trans- 


mee Bil 111.) ¥ 2. 

2 A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, p. 172, on Shelley. 

* See F. C. Conybeare, Monuments of Early Christianity, pp. 49-60, 
and translation of Armenian text that follows; Sir W. M. Ramsay, 
Christian Church in Roman Empire, chap. xvi. 


172 PAUL OF TARSUS 


lated from the Syriac, is free from certain interpola- 
tions present in Syriac MSS. of the fifth century; in 
fact, that, with one exception, all the matters con- 
jectured by Sir William Ramsay to be second century 
interpolations vanish, and we have a version that may 
very nearly represent a first century original. In this 
we read how Onesiphorus goes out to meet Paul at the 
cross-roads ; ‘Titus has told him what sort of a man to 
look for ; and by and by he sees “‘ coming along a man 
of moderate stature, with curly [or crisp] hair and 
scanty; crooked legs; with blue eyes; and large 
knit eyebrows ; long nose; and he was full of the grace 
and pity of the Lord, sometimes having the appear- 
ance of a man, but sometimes looking like an angel.” } 
The other texts omit the blue eyes; the Syriac says 
they were large; it tones down a little the crooked- 
ness of the legs, and puts it more clearly that his eye- 
brows met, and that it was his hair that was scanty, 
but it says nothing about the hair being curly. The 
meeting eyebrows, a modern scholar tells us, were a 
mark of the were-wolf ; so we have to beware lest they 
were added by a theological hand to link the Benjamite 
with his ancestor, ‘‘ the ravening wolf.” 2 

‘This plain and unflattering account of the Apostle’s 
personal appearance,” writes Sir William Ramsay, 
*““ seems to embody a very early tradition.” We have 
not to ignore the possibility that it was written up 
from Paul’s description of himself, nor the certainty 
that there were plenty of people in Asia Minor who did 
not need to read his letters written to Corinth to know 
what he was like. ‘His bodily appearance,” people 
said at Corinth, “‘ is weakly and his speech is contempt- 
ible.” * So Paul quotes what men said; and, without 
thinking of them, he says elsewhere,* ‘‘ we have this 
treasure (viz., the enlightenment of God’s glory in the 
face of Christ) in vessels of clay.”? Elsewhere his 


1 Conybeare, op. cit., p. 62. * Gen. 2iixr27, 
* 2) Corex, 10, 4 2 Cor. 1ve 7% 


THE HUMAN PAUL 173 


body is a mere tent, in which he groans, longing for 
a heavenly structure quite different from it. Writing 
to the Philippians, who did not, so far as we know, 
say unkind things about his looks and accents, he speaks, 
almost with resentment, of his ‘‘ humiliating body.” 2 
Of frail health, of a thorn in the flesh, of some recurring 
disorder that degrades him (epilepsy, it is guessed), 
perhaps of weak eyes, he speaks in one place and 
another. He “‘ dies daily.’ 4 It seems a thoroughly 
sound conclusion ® that he was very sensitive about his 
weakness ; it was the thing he found hardest to bear ; 
he felt men might “spit at it”? ’—perhaps to avert 
the omen. 

Yet the humiliating body must have been un- 
commonly tough. When we read such a catalogue of 
adventures as he quickly runs over, in writing to the 
Corinthians 7—“ in labours more abundant, in stripes 
above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths 
oft,” five inflictions of the thirty-nine stripes of the 
Jews, three times the Roman beating with rods, three 
shipwrecks, a night and a day in the sea, journeys, 
perils of water and land, of city and open country, 
brigands, traitors, “‘ weariness and painfulness, watch- 
ing, hunger, thirst, cold, nakedness”? and endless 
worry—all or enough of it confirmed by Luke in the 
Acts—we can endorse the judgment that his life-work 
“‘as a mere physical performance challenges our 
admiration.” § 

Claudius Lysias, judging from Paul’s appearance, 
took him to be possibly an Egyptian—not an Egyptian 
Jew, for he was astonished to find that Paul spoke 
Greek.® ‘The incident is so odd, and has in the end 


morn ye ts ch./t'Cor. xv, 53- a Pal, iio Fe 

® Cf. 2 Cor. xii. 7; Gal. iv. 13, 14 (where the language is very 
emphatic), 15 ; and add Acts xiv. 12, where it was clear that he was 
no Jupiter. 

eeicor ty. 31. \ 5B. W. Bacon, Paul, p..39.) .* Galuiver4. 

aos. 24 f+. ch. xi, 10; Rom. vill. 35.3 1Cor, xv. 30,.32. 

* Deissmann, Pau/ (trn.), p. 65. ° Acts xxi. 38. 


174 PAUL OF TARSUS 


so little importance, that it looks very real. ‘The 
very name Claudius Lysias almost precludes our 
thinking him a new-comer to the East, where such 
racial distinctions are patent at once to residents. 
Paul may really have looked like an Egyptian; his 
shaven head, if it was shaved, may have suggested the 
idea; but the tone of Paul’s reply suggests that he did 
not like it. I cannot explain the point. 

When we pass from Paul’s appearance to his mind, 
we move out of the realm of conjecture. First, let 
us set his great gift of winning and keeping friends. 
*¢ The less commonplace a man is,” wrote Pascal, “‘ the 
more remarkable people he will meet.” Paul gathered 
up acquaintances and friends wherever he went. He 
interested men, provoked them to controversy some- 
times, at other times charmed them, and won them 
every way. When the riot took place at Ephesus,? 
Aristarchus, the Macedonian of Thessalonica, was with 
him ; he was with him still, when, after his captivity 
at Caesarea, he sailed for Rome;? he was with him 
when he wrote to the Colossians and to Philemon, one 
of a group that includes the evangelists Mark and Luke. 
The courage, that launched him on that Ephesian 
day into the theatre, appealed to Paul—“ a Cock of 
the right kind,” as Captain Greatheart says of Old 
Honest in the Pilgrim’s Progress. But, at the same 
time, some of the Asiarchs, the priests of the worship of 
the Emperor, urged Paul not to go into the theatre ; 
it was a friendly act, and one wonders how they came 
to be on such terms with him. But the same thing 
happens with the centurion in charge of his ship ; 
they have not sailed far before he allows Paul to go 
ashore freely to see his friends and to refresh himself ; 3 
and, at a later point on the voyage, though he would 


1 Acts xix. 23 ff. 2 Acts xxvil. 2. 

$ Acts xxvil. 3; a comparison with Acts xx. 13, where Paul prefers 
a land journey on foot to a not very long sail, has prompted the homely 
but very probable suggestion that he was not a good sailor. 


THE HUMAN PAUL 175 


not accept the old traveller’s sea-lore, and was wrong, 
he takes care that Paul is not killed by the soldiers ; 
the other prisoners, one gathers, he was more ready to 
do without—vzle damnum, as Tiberius said. Felix too 
felt Paul’s charm—quite apart from base hopes, and 
used to send for him and talk with him rather 
frequently.1. The long lists of men and women to 
whom Paul sent greetings speak for themselves.? 

An episode, to which he refers in writing to the 
Corinthians,? illustrates what friendship meant to him. 
“Furthermore when I came to Troas to preach 
Christ’s gospel, and a door was opened to me of the 
Lord, I had no rest in my spirit because I found not 
Titus my brother; but I took my leave of them and 
went to Macedonia.” He does not idly use the phrase 
of the door opened to him ;4 and yet, in spite of the 
door, in spite of the opening for the gospel, he cannot 
settle down alone to preach, he needs the support 
of a colleague, and he must have Titus. A few 
chapters later, he describes his meeting with ‘Titus ; 
“God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by 
the coming of Titus.”” When Titus brings him good 
news from Corinth, he is still more helped—“ yes, and 
so much the more overflowingly (his characteristic 
mTepircotépws, to which we must return) did we 
rejoice in Titus’ joy, because his soul found rest in all 
of you.” ‘There is a hint of the same disposition to 
be uneasy if left alone, when he writes to the Thessa- 
lonians,® how he had longed to hear of them, and how, 


1 Acts xxiv. 26, ruxvérepov. 

2 Someone has reckoned that sixty of his friends are mentioned by 
Paul in his letters, and that twenty more are named by Luke. It is 
not so simple to count them as might seem. I make sixty-seven 
mentioned by Paul, excluding Apostles and ’Timothy’s kindred, and a 
doubtful second Gaius. I cannot make out twenty more in the Acts. 

See 1121135 113.3 Vis 6,-7; 13. 

“Cf. the “ great door and effectual’ opened at Ephesus, 1 Cor. xvi. 
9; and Col. iv. 3. 

§ x Thess. il. I. 


176 PAUL OF TARSUS 


when he could bear it no longer, “‘ we thought it good 
to be left in Athens alone.” 

Other passages suggest his feeling when people are 
about him and are sympathetic. ‘“‘ You know,” he 
tells the Galatians, ‘‘ how in weakness of the flesh I 
preached to you the former time, and my temptation 
[a variant; your temptation] in my flesh you did not 
disdain, but received me as an angel of God, as Christ 
Jesus. ... If it had been possible, you would have 
dug out your eyes and given them to me.”?! ‘The 
gratitude and the happiness that the message and the 
gifts of the Philippians wake in him, and the glowing 
and charming language in which he expresses them, 
show what sympathy meant to him ;—he is “ initiated 
into doing without,” but it was delightful (“ I rejoiced 
in the Lord hugely” ) that they had blossomed out 
into all this thought for him; they did well in taking 
a share in his troubles, they had done it before, and 
now he has all he can want and overflows; it is like 
a fragrance, and God must enjoy it as much as he does, 
and will meet all their need.? In particular, Paul, in 
his business of preaching the gospel, wants the support 
of men’s prayers, as others have wanted it since him, 
and he suggests it again and again.* ‘That is one of the 
great things, he feels, about Christ—‘* who also makes 
intercession for us.” 4 

With all the obvious quickness of his temper— 
generally, we find, roused by crookedness or cowardice 
—he is eager to help men (“ for whom Christ died ” 5), 
and he emphasizes forgiveness, gentleness, and patience 
—‘‘ putting up with one another and forgiving one | 
another, if any one has a grudge against any one else ; 
as the Lord forgave you, so do you in your turn.” 8 
Why must the Corinthians have lawsuits inside the 
church ? Why cannot they just accept the wrong 

+ Gal 1¥,, 13,145.15; 2 Phil. iv. 10-19. 

22 Cord. 114; Col iv. 3 se Roney, aor 4 Rom. vill. 34. 

By Cor vil. 11. ® Col. iii. 133 cf. Rom. xii. 19. 


THE HUMAN PAUL 177 


done to them, and be content to be swindled?! The 
followers of Apollos, it is thought, did what they 
could to embitter Paul’s life,? but they did not succeed 
in making a quarrel. Paul recognizes heartily God’s 
use of Apollos; it is all one, “‘ ye are Christ’s and 
Christ is God’s.” He has a tolerance for weaker 
brethren, and suffers fools gladly, and, while he will 
not give way—* no ! not for an hour ! ”—on a question 
of principle for all the Judaizers in the world, nor for 
Peter himself and all “ the pillars,” yet he will humour 
the crotchets of the weaker minds, and, if it will really 
do them any good, he is ready to eat no meat while 
the world stands. He has a sharp quarrel with 
Barnabas over Mark’s desertion in Pisidia, and after- 
wards he is thoroughly reconciled to Mark.’ He begs 
his friends to avoid annoying people,* and husbands 
not to be “cross” (or surly) with their wives.’ His 
own ideals in friendship are surely to be read in his 
thirteenth chapter to the Corinthians. 

He is a leader of men—a Garibaldi, one might almost 
say, in adventure, and a Socrates in thought ; he will 
carry his friends with him into all sorts of risks for 
Christ’s sake, and he will emancipate their minds, 
not by a dialectic method, though he used that, but 
by winning their trust and giving them new ideas. 
And here a rather closer examination of his vocabulary 
is very illuminative. 

Most great writers have their mannerisms. ‘Thucy- 
dides has a curious fancy for recording the greatest 
expedition that ever sailed, the biggest disaster, the 
best defence on a capital charge, the most enduring 
counter-revolution ever effected with the smallest 
numbers, and other odd superlatives, almost American.® 
Cicero in his letters is noted as having a weakness 


Pt Cor. via7 3: Cf. 1 Cor. ty. 13; Sr Corin. 45 Ssaae 
8 Acts xv. 36-40; Col. iv. 10; Philemon, 24. 
4 2 Cor. vi. 3, tpooKxorny. ® Col, iy 19. 


® See W. H. Forbes, Thucydides I., Introduction, p. xxiii. 


al 


178 PAUL OF TARSUS 


for diminutives and for terms with the prepositional 
prefix sub-; it serves to qualify, to tone down, what 
he suggests rather than asserts.1 Paul has two pre- 
positions with which he makes great play—ovp- and 
virep-. All three writers are highly individual men, 
very quick and very sensitive, who can make language 
do what they wish, if they have to re-model it as 
they write. Paul’s two prepositions will have to be 
considered at points later on, where they bear vitally 
upon the subject?; ovv- concerns us at once. Of 
course Greek abounds in compounds of ovp-, in 
which any special suggestion which the preposition 
may have had has long been lost. We need not 
investigate synagogue, nor ovvTpiBw (to smash, as in 
Mark xiv. 3), nor kinsfolk (ovyyevets), nor even 
sympathy, though these last two may or may not 
keep a suggestion of fellowship according to who 
uses them. 

It is remarkable that Paul does not use anywhere 
the word “friend”? (@idos). ‘‘ Beloved’ (ayamnrés) 
is applied by him to ten persons—Timothy, Tychicus 
(twice), Epaphroditus, Onesimus (twice), Philemon, 
‘“¢ Luke the beloved physician,” and four less known 
people in Romans xvi. ‘The general community 
often receives this pleasant word. Meanwhile the 
“brothers ”? occupy two columns in the concordance. 
But the ovv- compounds suggest even closer relations, 
in the case of such a man as Paul. We naturally ask 
what they share with him; and above all and first 
comes work. Priscilla and Aquila, Urbanus, ‘Timothy, 
- Titus, Epaphroditus, Clement, Aristarchus, Mark, Jesus 
Justus, Philemon—eleven “‘fellow-workers”’ (cvvepyot) 
are greeted or mentioned by name, and others are 
indicated in the plural. To a man or woman of any 

tines R. Y. Tyrrell, Cicero in His Letters, Introduction, pp. lxxxvi., 
Ixxxviil., “nearly every adjective and adverb in the language is 
intensified by the prefix per- and mitigated by the prefix sud-,” verbs 
too. 


2 See pp. 195, 212. * Phil. ivi gs 


THE HUMAN PAUL 179 


spirit or character to be so described by one of Paul’s 
build and nature must have been in itself inspiration. 
“Partner” (kowavds), though not a compound in 
form, is almost a synonym, and like its derivative 
“* fellow-partner” (cvyKowwvetv, Phil. i. 7) must have 
meant something to those so named. ‘The “ true 
yoke-fellow”’ (yvrjove Svlvye, if Paul is, as seems 
probable, playing with the man’s name) is bidden 
co-operate (ovAAapBavov) with the women who (if one 
may dare coin it in English) synathletized with Paul 
(cvvy7P\noav)—a rather striking word; and the verse 
ends with fellow-workers unnamed—four instances 
in one verse of the preposition.t The Philippians 
are called on to be “fellow-imitators”’ with Paul 
(ovpptpyrat),? and “of one soul” with him (cvpyvyor).3 
The Corinthians are—if a clumsy and colloquial transla- 
tion may be allowed to bring out the suggestion— 
“¢ putting in joint work at prayer ” for Paul,* and they 
*‘ are in Paul’s heart to share death with and to share 
life with ” (cuvarofavety Kat avr). 

Paul, as we know, constantly described himself as 
the slave of Christ ; then Epaphroditus and Tychicus 
are his “‘ fellow-slaves ”’ ® (a¥vdoudos), one “* beloved ” 
as well, and the other “brother.” It is hard to 
imagine language more moving for men who knew 
what that service meant to Paul. Epaphroditus else- 
where is Paul’s “ fellow-soldier ” (avorparidrys), and 
so is the less-known Archippos.? And at the last, 
when the dark days are come and liberty is gone, Paul 
has “‘ fellow-prisoners ” (cvvatypddwros)—“ kinsfolk,” 
two of them, Andronicus and Junia, who “ were in 
Christ before me,” ® and perhaps, if the term is literal, 
had helped to make the ferment which preceded his 
conversion—Epaphroditus, again, linked by a new 
bond (his fourth ovv-),® and the loyal Macedonian 

1 Phil. iv. 3. 2 Phil. iii. 17. 8 Phil. ii. 2. 

Sime Cored. 51. a2 Cori. 3: Coli as Fis iv: 7. 

7 Phil. ii.25; Philemon2. *Rom.xvi.7. ® Philemon 23. 


180 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Aristarchus,! of whom, whenever he is mentioned, 
one regrets that we do not know more. 

So far the concordance takes us; but when from a 
more human point of view we try to translate it all 
into life, it must surely affect our estimate of Paul’s 
character. He must have had a much more deeply 
affectionate and sympathetic nature than we some- 
times think. ‘ Brethren” in England is conventional 
and formal; abroad, where one’s fellow-believers are 
few and poor, it has a new value; ‘ beloved” is an 
old-world word, not often to-day used with much 
real meaning in common life. But look at the list 
of compounds—how individual they are, how full of 
two biographies both known to the recipient, and the 
greater illuminating the less! The dearest of all ties 
for Paul is to find men sharing things with him. ‘The 
work, the “athletic ” life, the yoke, the slavery, the 
imitation,—these are all expressions of his relation 
with Jesus Christ, the very essence of life; how much 
more it is to him when he finds his friends standing 
with him in that great loyalty! Fond as he is of men 
by nature,? apt to fall into friendship and to enjoy 
men and to depend on them, these natural ties and 
affections have something of the infinite, something 
of eternity, in them, and when the ordinary relation 
is turned into a common devotion to Christ, the men 
are more to him than ever they were. To his friends 
in the same way the compound nouns, some of them 
perhaps newly made, and all newly applied, must have 
been full of significance. Cicero cheerily twits one of 
his young friends, telling him he is so vain that he 
would rather have Caesar ask his opinion than be 
“ gold-plated ” by Caesar ;% of course he would, any 

1 Col. iv. 10. 

2 Another Ciceronian trait. Cicero “ loved young men, especially 
clever ones, and was apt to take an optimistic view of them.” Warde 
Fowler, Social Life at Rome, p. 128. 


* Cicero to Trebatius ‘Testa, 53 B.c.; ad Fam. vii. 13, malle a 
Caesare consuli guam inaurari. 


THE HUMAN PAUL 181 


man of spirit would! And when Aristarchus and 
Epaphroditus found the very greatest and most charm- 
ing man they ever knew grappling them to his soul 
by words that proclaim them of one corps and of one 
college with himself, fellows in work and fellows in 
suffering for the same great Chief, how did they feel ? 
‘The wonder is rather that Demas could leave him ; 
and here we may note in passing (and say no more of 
Demas) how the Apostle speaks of his renunciation. 
Whatever later elements critics may find in the epistles 
to Timothy, or alien elements (if that would beg fewer 
questions), the hand of Paul is surely there. Like 
Carlyle’s, according to Sterling, his signature is in every 
word he writes. He 1s old and feeling his age, solitary 
and in some anxiety as to his future, needing more than 
ever support and friendship; and Demas “has for- 
saken me—having loved this present world.” ? Paul 
feels his going; but above all things he grieves that a 
man he loves should prefer the fugitive to the eternal 
and choose not Christ but the mere present. Here 
also we touch the heart of Paul, in its gentleness and its 
craving for men. 

Jiilicher puts some relevant questions, suggested by 
the complicated relations with Corinth. Had Paul, he 
asks, in any very high degree the gifts of ruling men 
and reading their hearts? Was he apt to judge them 
by his own standards? Great and intense natures 
do this, and misread men; if small men, as we saw 
Pascal suggesting, do not recognize greatness when 
they see it, have not great men a similar habit of not 
realizing how petty the run of men are? Was Paul 
never wrong when he reckoned on men seeing, and 
being, with his own swiftness and sureness? ‘The 
question itself hints his greatness. Jiilicher goes 
further; was Paul rather too Jewish in outlook and 
tradition to identify himself with Greek views? Did 
his abrupt changes of plan, brought about by his visions 

42) Vim. tv. '10. 


182 PAUL OF TARSUS 


—or, as at Troas, by the chafing of solitude—confuse 
and upset his friends? Some certainly accused him 
of vacillation and of impulsiveness (€kadpia)—the 
bright quick words of Paul to the Corinthians? about 
** Yea, yea” and “Nay, nay ” tell that tales Genes 
in speech and action often depends on a swiftness of 
mind in realizing an unnoticed change in a situation 
that may be vital, but which commoner intelligences 
miss; and such genius has the defects of its qualities, 
as we hardly need to be told. Alexander achieved 
everything by reading men swiftly and profoundly ; 
his very foundation was his understanding of his 
Macedonians; but, when it came to Oriental state and 
Persian dress, he entirely misread his own countrymen. 
But, concludes Jiilicher—to return to his criticism—the 
ever-infectious zeal of the enthusiast, Paul’s courage 
and faith, his self-sacrifice and tenderness, make his 
influence a spell. If he had the defects of genius, he 
had its magic, and men followed him instinctively, ana- 
lysing their leader and their own motives as little as 
men ever do when a real leader appears. Avdrds eda. 

But with so many friendships there came many 
claims; there were communities in which he was 
involved, there were individuals who were no less a 
source of anxiety. ‘To genius it must in the end be 
painfully clear what a faculty for going wrong the 
ordinary man has. Paul was in his own person the 
bond of unity that held some of those communities 
together and kept them in touch with other churches.? 
How little cohesive “‘ saints ” can be, is always a source 
of wonder to people who take their opinions at second 
hand and shape life by the proverbs and maxims of 
others—as if the individualizing experience of con- 
version and knowledge of Christ really helped to blot 
out personality. Even in societies without ideas, 
personal ambition and vanity can work disruption, 
and they are not unknown in churches. ‘The churches 

ag Cort. 37, 18. * Cf. Deissmann, S¢ Pani, p. 187. 


THE HUMAN PAUL 183 


and Paul’s relations with them we have already dis- 
cussed, but they must not be forgotten here—“ that 
which cometh upon me daily, the care of all the 
churches,” and the individuals in them—‘‘ who is 
weak, and I am not weak? who is offended, and I 
burn not?” Dr Strachan } speaks of Paul’s “‘ yearning 
for the stupid man”—a modern and very happy 
rendering of his spirit and very near his own words ; 
the stupid man always costs a lot—in patience, if in 
nothing else. A pupil of genius is a stimulus when he 
is not a terror; bright and intelligent friends, as Paul 
shows, reinforce you. But “ the foolish things of this 
world ”’ are intolerable, if it were not for the over- 
powering facts that God chose them and Christ died 
for them. So Paul is theirs to command,—ready to 
explain the same thing a hundred times, to bear all 
things, to hope all things, to endure all things, if by 
any means he may save some of them from themselves 
and their own crotchets. 

Of course, the duller and the less Christian his 
converts were, the more apt they were to worry him 
with stupidity and criticism. ‘‘ After considerable 
experience,” Mr Aldis Wright once wrote,? “I feel 
justified in saying that in most cases ignorance and 
conceit are the parents of conjectural emendation,” 
and alas! they have other offspring. Ignorance and 
conceit produced abundant criticism of Paul ’—he 
did not do many miracles,‘ nor have enough visions ; 5 
he was not really like an apostle ;® he was of inexcus- 
ably mean appearance;7 he sought to please men;8 
he did not write as he felt;® he tricked people with 
his cunning (zavotpyos d6\w); 1° he was much too 

1R. H. Strachan, Individuality of St Paul, p. 133. 


2 Preface to edition of Milton, p. xix. 
® See generally K. Lake, Earlier Epistles, pp. 223 f.; Deissmann, 


Paul, pp. 71 f. #2 Corsxitiyt b. 
5 2 Cor. xii. I-10. ¢'2 Cor, xi,/7-11. 
1a Core x.17,' LO. © Gal. 110% 


Seow). 13: 40/2: Cor xia Gs 


184 PAUL OF TARSUS 


impulsive (as we saw already) and showed signs of being 
wrong in the head. All these pleasant insinuations 
are to be gathered from his letters—when one looks 
for them. His defence is spirited, but it is not bitter, 
as with many men it would have been. But we can 
believe that at times he ‘‘ was loaded beyond his 
strength, beyond hyperbole, and told himself it was 
the sentence of death’? 2—so much so that he had 
nothing between him and breakdown except God. 
** Without there were fights, within there were fears,” ® 
and then Titus turned up, or God sent him. He seems 
to have had other worries, beyond what we might 
have expected, and not all magnificent ; he was more 
sensitive to mockery and to criticism of his style and 
of his message than would have been guessed without 
his confession. ‘I was with you,” he tells the Cor- 
inthians, apparently speaking of his first visit, after 
his Athenian experience, “‘in weakness and in fear 
and in much trembling, and my speech and my preach- 
ing were not in the persuasive language of wisdom.” 4 

In all these things, as in others, he is more than 
conqueror. It is significant of character, that he him- 
self is our source of knowledge for all his troubles and 
for all the criticism that came upon him—a sign, too, 
that they did not overcome him. But he himself says 
plainly that God delivered him, does deliver, and (he 
trusts and believes) will deliver him.’ The power of 
God ® is always with him; Jesus (the Lord) assures 
him that “ My grace is sufficient for thee,” so that the 
hour when he is weak is exactly the time when he is 
strongest ;’ and he gives thanks to God “* who always 
makes us triumph in Christ.” ® As Luke shows us in 
the Acts, Paul is conscious that God sends him guidance, 


and, if a modern critic remarks that Paul is “not 
Rie Cor. v.53) 8 2 Cor. i. 8, 9. 
Ba AJOL Vili 56 7 Cor cite 
§ 2, Cor. 1. 10, * x Cor. ii, 4, §3 2 Cor. vi 7§ Xe 


7 2 Cor. xii. Q. © 2 Cor. ii. 14. 


THE HUMAN PAUL 185 


conscious of any co-operation of his own mind in these 
great leaps of faith,’ + Paul there stands with most 
who have known such guidance. ‘The first condition 
of it is the wish to do God’s will. Yet, with it all, we 
can understand how often he must have wished to be 
done with this life of fightings and fears, of criticism 
and strain, ‘to depart and to be with Christ—far — 
better.”.4 

Whether we should connect his visions and his 
speaking with tongues with his physical nature (if such 
distinctions are at all sound), and associate them with 
the constant strain on him, or with the movements of 
what might popularly be called his intellect and the 
workings of a passionate nature, we may avoid deciding 
by placing them between these two parts of our study. 
The whole question of visions is an intricate one, not 
yet fully worked out. Paul was quite definite in 
stating that he had seen Jesus at the gate of Damascus. 
But the “ certain man of Macedonia,” who called him 
over to Europe,—did Paul see him in a dream, or 
awake, or between? 4 It may be urged that it stands 
in the same category as the vision of Jesus, but the 
language would admit of a dream ; and, if Sir William 
Ramsay’s suggestion is right that the certain Mace- 
donian was Luke, we should have to decide that it was 
a dream. But at Corinth when “the Lord spoke to 
Paul in the night by a vision,” '—at Jerusalem when, 
“on the night following, the Lord stood by him and 
said Be of good cheer, Paul,’ ®—on the ship when 
“there stood by me this night the angel of God,” ? 
we may debate as we please between dream and other 
forms of vision, and reach no certainty. In such 
cases the psychologists tell us that it is extremely hard 
to be definite either way. Had the man, who saw, an 
instantaneous dream in the moment of waking? It 
is there that time fails to be regular—it is so short and 


1B. W. Bacon, Paul, p. 41. Ab ad STAT 3 See pp. 64-66. 
“Acts xvi.g. ‘*Actsxvill.g. ‘Acts xxiii, rr. 7 Acts xxvil. 23. 


186 PAUL OF TARSUS 


seems solong. When Paul stood before Nero and “ the 
Lord stood by me and put strength into me,” ! it is 
obvious that it was not night and that he was not 
asleep; but it is not clear that he means a visible 
appearance of the Lord to him. On the other hand, 
his story of being caught up to the third heaven and 
hearing unutterable words,? coincides with the language 
of mystical vision, and turns the scale (with Damascus) 
decisively in favour of Paul also being of the company 
of the mystics.® 

When he says that he “‘ spoke with tongues ” 4—if he 
really means, as appears, exactly the same phaenomenon 
that occurred at Corinth, and is not saying (what was 
certainly true) that he spoke more languages than his 
converts who had only Greek—if we are to take it that 
he was himself liable to the disturbance that produces 
** slossolaly ’—his confession is to a modern reader 
perplexing and uncomfortable. But his judgment 
flashes out in the next sentence, and whether he speaks 
with these unintelligible ‘ tongues” or not, he dis- 
misses the gift (or affliction, as we should be more apt 
to say) to the irrelevance which belongs toit. ‘Tongues 
will cease, he says himself;5 and he knows with a 
glorious certainty what really matters. Whatever signs 
he may have of abnormal psychology, in judgment, 
clarity and sanity he is the peer of any man. As we 
saw in the story of the Damascus gate, whatever 
occurred, Paul brought it to the test of as sound 
judgment and as searching experiment as a whole life 
of verification allowed. 

At this point we pass naturally to consider his 
habits of mind and thought. His mind, says Professor 


12 Tim. iv. 17. 92 Coraxies 

° Cf. Rufus M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, pp. 11, 123 
‘Paul was psychologically possessed of a constitution plainly adapted 
to experiences of an unusual sort; ... but... set slight value on 
extraordinary phaenomena.” 

$ Ti Cor mya Bs § x Cor. xii. 8. 


THE HUMAN PAUL 187 


Gilbert Murray,! “for all its vehement mysticism 
and enthusiasm, has something of that clean antiseptic 
quality of Minucius and the writer to Diognetus.” 
In an earlier chapter we noted his luminous truth- 
fulness of thought ; he is as sincere and truthful with 
himself, as insistent on truth in others, as the best Greek 
thinkers or the Hebrew prophets. No one can read 
the epistle to the Galatians with any intelligence and 
fail to realize his force of character, his independence 
of mind; he did not borrow or adopt his religion from 
anybody, the “ pillars”’ really did not help him, and 
he had never asked them to confirm what he knew 
directly from the Lord. If he is independent of men’s 
judgments, he is equally plain about independence of 
men’s purses ; he plied a handicraft in Greece when it 
was necessary, and he would again. On the ship in 
the storm he naturally gravitates to the front, unper- 
turbed and imperturbable; in the fair weather the 
centurion might listen to the master mariner; in the 
storm Paul was in the ascendant. So it always is with 
him ; if the situation is difficult, his inspired common 
sense carries him straight to the real issue. At Antioch 
he brings Peter abruptly face to face with the facts ; 
he forces the Galatians to look squarely at the real 
issue. If we are to be told to-day that he belongs 
to the same sort as the adherents of the mystery 
religions, it is surely said by people who have no 
sense of character. If answer is needed, it lies in 
his type of mind; he is much more like Plato than 
the Orphics, and intellectually not in the category 
of mystai and initiates, the devotees of sensation 
and emotion. Paul is a thinker and they were not 


1 Four Stages, p.145. Ifthe reader wishes to know a little more of 
Minucius, he was a Latin apologist of the second or third century, a 
Christian with a beautiful Latin style; and the unnamed writer to 
Diognetus was a Greek, whose little masterpiece is printed with the 
Apostolic Fathers and outshines them. 

2 Acts xvili. 3; xx. 343 cf. 2 Cor. xl. 8-10. 


188 PAUL OF TARSUS 


thinkers; he is original, and they, however pious, 
were mere parrots. 

The ancients, and not they alone, have had a way 
of attributing a man’s thoughts to something not 
himself. It was afamous suggestion of Plato’s—whether 
he was playful, ironical or serious, or all three when he 
suggested it—that poetry comes more or less from 
without to a man, it is not a matter of his thinking 
it out ; aman who “ approaches the gates of the Muses 
without madness,” but sober and in possession of his 
own mind, will not produce great poetry; he will be 
eclipsed by the “ madman,” who from without has 
received another mind.! Philo, an older contemporary 
of Paul’s, records the same sort of experience that 
most men have who write; sometimes he “saw 
clearly ” what to say, but ‘‘ the womb of his soul was 
closed’; at other times he “came empty and was 
suddenly full, as thoughts were imperceptibly sowed 
and snowed upon him from above,” and, as if divinely 
possessed and “‘ corybantic,” he wrote, forgetful of 
self and place and of writing itself.2 It is the vivid 
thought that startles a man, which he thus attributes 
to another mind. It goes with a certain quickness 
and sureness of perception, an almost painfully intense 
realization of the thing in the very colours and move- 
ments of life. As John Bunyan tells us, again and again, 
a man would rather be without the gift, for evil may 
come that way as well as good. In Grace Abounding 
he describes how his thoughts did “ roar and bellow 
within me like masterless hell-hounds.” When he 
describes Christian in the Valley of the Shadow of 
Death, he italicizes the whole passage, which he also 
emphasizes by special notice; fiends, he says, put 
blasphemies into the pilgrim’s mind, which he thought 
were his own, and “‘ was more put to it” than in any 
former trouble ‘even to think that he should now 


1 Plato, Phaedrus, 245A; Lon, 533-534. 
® Philo, de migratione Abrahami, 7 (441M). 


THE HUMAN PAUL 189 


blaspheme him, that he loved so much before: yet 
if he could have helped it, he would not have done it,” 
but he did not ‘‘ know from whence those blasphemies 
came.” 

Paul tells us no such story, yet there are hints. In 
one place we read of a warfare not against flesh and 
blood; he is very explicit indeed on the great war 
between Christ and the powers of evil, in which he is 
enlisted. Hence, when he tells the Corinthians that 
his warfare is not after the flesh but mighty in God for 
the reduction of strongholds, and then adds that it is 
the reduction of reflexions (Aoyiopovs) and of every 
high thing that lifts itself or is set up against the 
knowledge of God, and “ bringing into captivity every 
thought to the obedience of Christ,’ + to those who 
know something of current beliefs as to the daemon 
world the passage is at once suggestive. One of his 
most beautiful benedictions loses some of its value 
in our Authorized Version through the translators 
missing the point that he speaks of thoughts: ‘the 
peace of God, that passeth all understanding (which 
is beyond every mind), shall keep your hearts and your 
thoughts in Christ Jesus.” 2 Paul probably felt that his 
own thoughts needed such guarding. A man who has 
visions from one side will have them from the other ; 
if he has guidance, if he is “ told what thou must do,” 
he is open to misleading too ; there will be “‘ messengers 
of Satan.” ® In a swift mind like his, the readiest 
explanation of some thoughts will be the coming of 
those “‘ messengers”; pray God, then, to keep and 
control your thoughts, he says. We have to re- 
member how he was criticized for that impulsive- 
ness of his, to remember his quick depressions and 
exaltations. 

With his swiftness of mind we must connect the 
sudden tangents of thought, which confuse his style 
to the perplexity of the logical but illuminate the 

Rog. Cor. -Xi23-S. * Phil. iv:7; § ai Gor sie 7s 


190 PAUL OF TARSUS 


reader who will let him do as he pleases—always the 
safest way when one is reading the work of genius. 
For example, in a passage already noticed,} has he been 
careless of his friends in Corinth ? a Yes and No man, 
to one thing constant never? As God is faithful, his 
word to them has not been Yes and No; the Son of 
God, Christ Jesus, preached among you by us, was 
not Yes and No, but Yes was inhim. And Paul swings 
off into the magnificent conception that in Christ is 
the Yes of all God’s promises and by him comes man- 
kind’s Amen to God’s work. None of it is quite 
relevant to the change of plan which kept him away 
from Corinth, but it is splendid. If the Corinthians 
will not forgive him now, everybody else will, and will 
be glad that he failed to appear at Corinth if apology 
can produce such illuminative irrelevance. Again, at 
the end of the letter to the Galatians,? the amanuensis 
lays down the pen—there must have been easier people 
to take down in shorthand than Paul; and if it had 
to be done in longhand, the stylus would be laid down 
with some feeling of relief. ‘‘ I, Tertius, who wrote 
this Epistle”? * must have needed the pen of a ready 
writer. Paul picks up the pen, and plays with “ the 
large fair hand” he writes or is going to write—and 
all of a sudden flashes off into some people’s idea of “‘a 
large fair show” and how pleased they are with it— 
and then off again into one of his own most famous 
sentences, which forty words back, he had no vestige 
of an idea of writing. ‘“‘ God forbid that I should 
glory, save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by 
which the world is crucified to me, and I to the 
world.” Celsus in the second century says scornfully 
that every Christian of every school quoted that 
text. And it was written, one might say, by sheer 
accident! If the Tertius of the day had held on a 
little longer, we should not have had it. A similar 
sudden tangent, about godliness after all being 
42 Cor, 1.:17 £. 2 Gal. vi. I-14. * Rom. xvi. 22. 


THE HUMAN PAUL IOI 


gain,’ is one of several stylistic marks which vindicate 
at least parts of the epistles to Timothy as Pauline. 
Impressionable, intuitive, amazingly quick of mind, 
open to doubts and tears and fears, up and down,? 
pressed beyond belief and beyond life, and gloriously 
delivered by a Saviour, whom he realizes as (one is 
tempted to say) no one else ever has done—little 
wonder the man was electric; that Jews and Judaizers 
hated one so swift and keen; that matter-of-fact 
Christians could never make out where he was going 
or what he would do next, that Aristarchus, Epaphro- 
ditus, Luke and the rest “clave to him” through 
thick and thin; that the Church kept the letters 
and got them by heart, even if it had to wait nearly 
fifteen centuries for a qualified interpreter of them. 
Of that interpreter he reminds us; he and Luther 
have the same mixture of tenderness and fierceness.® 
A nature open to many appeals, swift and intense, will 
be quick to understand others—quick sometimes to 
misunderstand. Paul is a master of courtesy because 
he does not cultivate a manner; he likes men and 
tries to put himself at their various points of view— 
he will be “servant of all,’ a Jew to Jews, under the 
law and free of the law, ‘* weak” (which must have 
been a struggle), “all things to all men to win them,” 4 
for the gospel’s sake. So he says, and he means it ; 
but even apart from the gospel, one can guess that he 
must have had charm. He has great powers of tender- 
ness; he thinks of himself as mother and nurse of his 
friends, whose Christian life is young. On the other 
hand, as we saw at the beginning, he has no tolerance 
for anything like falsity or injustice; he “ delivers to 


11 Tim. vi. 6; the Authorized Version gets verse 5 backwards 
forwards. 

2 2 Cor. iv. g, and passage. 

® Deissmann, Pau/, p. 70. A short study of Luther’s letters will 
confirm this. 


#1 Cor. ix. 19-23. 5 Gal. iv. 193; 1 Thess. ii. 7. 


192 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Satan’’;1 his enemies are ‘‘ dogs” and ‘“ whited 
walls.” 2. He could wish them more mutilated than 
they mutilate themselves, he says,? but we do not 
believe it quite as literally as we do his words of friend- 
ship. He would relent when the fight was over, and 
forgive the man and make a friend of him at the first 
chance. Probably Peter and Barnabas and Mark 
would all endorse this, after experience of him both 
ways. It would be fair to say that every explosion, 
of which we have a record, is brought about, not by 
personal wrong done to himself, but by interference 
with the work and liberty of Christ—a sort of reverse 
of his intensity of devotion. 

Like many men of genius he sees things in snatches ; 
everything is lit up by a lightning flash, and one point 
after another is gained, never to be lost, and the rest 
have to follow or be left ; what he sees in the flash is 
all-important. Such, or something like it, was in part 
his intellectual growth, with hours of reasoning and 
hard thinking between. When Denney wrote that 
there was no time between one date and another 
for a certain development in Paul, it was a lapse in the 
critic. He would have admitted surely, if challenged, 
that such considerations of time may be relevant to 
ordinary men but are negligible with men of genius, 
whose rate of development is sometimes staggering 
to those who watch them. ‘The story of John Keats 
shows a development for which it might very well 
have been said there was no time. 

Swift thinkers have not always the balance of Paul. 
His basis is experience of Christ, and whatever 
thoughts flash into his head are soon brought (as we 
saw) to the obedience of Christ. That service is indeed 
a school of sanity. If the description of his develop- 
ment and character already given is true, Paul from the 
first was amenable to fact; his Jewish theories are 


an Gorsvi 326 30 Dims 20; 
* Phil. ii. 2; Acts xxiii. 3. 3 Gal. v. 12. 


THE HUMAN PAUL 193 
checked by the facts of Stephen’s spirit and death and 


vision. We have seen how he talks cold, sober, Chris- 
tian sense about speech with tongues, and how men 
complained that he did not live enough in an atmos- 
phere of miracle. He preferred preaching Christ to 
people in a way that would make them think about 
Christ to astonishing them with Paul’s gifts, natural or 
supernatural. ‘There is discipline in his life; he is 
initiated into the art of doing without; into the 
harder art of tolerating fools and adapting himself to 
them. A life so hard, so full of difficulty, privation, 
prison and danger, must have kept any man in touch 
with the actual; the risk with many men would have 
been of succumbing to it. But Paul is the common- 
sense idealist. 

One point is surely worthy of notice—an omission. 
In all his recommendations of Christian virtues and 
graces to his friends, whose minds had been previously 
directed to Jewish or Stoic greatness, he never seems 
to mention courage. He is frank enough in owning 
to fears and discouragements of his own, and a 
sensitive nature is to be read in all he says or writes. 
The nearest he comes to mentioning courage is in 
writing to Timothy; let no man despise ‘Timothy’s 
youth, he urges; Timothy should be “strong” ;? 
and he adds (if the reading is reliable) that “‘ God has 
not given to us the spirit of cowardice (devAtas), 
but of power and love and discipline.’ If he had 
not said to us, the sentence must have hit horribly 
hard; if it were not for the kind words that come 
with it, it would almost be cruel, as it stands. Once 
again, the personal touch is so strong in these two 
epistles, that it is very difficult to believe that “‘ the 
hand of Paul’’4 is not in them. If Paul, however, 
as a rule does not recommend courage, two lines of 
explanation seem obvious. A man of his record, who 


11 Tim. iv. 12. £2 Tim. ii. r. 
Azim, 3.:7. 4 Col. iv. 18. 


194 PAUL OF TARSUS 


is quite open in owning to fear, has obviously a great 
deal more courage than he realizes; he simply does 
not think about courage; it does not occur to him, 
because it is instinctive. Or, if he does realize that 
other people lack it, he sees at once that it is of no use 
to talk to them about it; and he emphasizes faith. 
If they once get their minds well set upon Christ, 
they will forget their fears, and Christ will do for them 
what they never would have achieved by courage. 
After so much said of Paul’s mind, a study of his 
style may involve us in some repetition; here, if 
anywhere, the style is the man. “The great style 
(uwos),”’ says Longinus, “ is the echo of a great soul.” 4 
But we have to realize that he is one of the great 
writers of Greece, and of the world. ‘‘ Paul,” said 
Erasmus, “‘ thunders and lightens and speaks sheer 
flame.” Luther? noted that “his peculiar phrase 
or kind of speech is not after the manner of men, 
but divine and heavenly, nor used of the Evangelists 
. .. avery strange and a monstrous way of speaking, 
which phrase is sweet and comfortable.” Norden, 
from quite another point of view, says that in Paul 
‘the language of the heart is born again. Since the 
hymn of Cleanthes nothing so intimate, nothing so 
splendid, had been written as Paul’s hymn to love” ; 
‘those two hymns of love to God and love to men 
(Rom. vill. 31; 1 Cor. xiii.) have given again to the 
Greek language what had been lost for centuries, the 
intimacy and the enthusiasm of the mystic, inspired 
by his union with God. ... How this language of 
the heart must have rung into the souls of men 
accustomed to the silly volubility of the sophists ! 
In these passages the diction of the Apostle rises to 
the height of Plato’s in the Phaedrus.” * Norden owns 


1 Longinus, Oz the Sublime, 9, 2. 

* Commentary on Galatians, il. 203; fol. 83a, in the sixteenth-century 
English translation. 

* Norden, Kuzsiprosa, lil. pp, 459, 599. 


THE HUMAN PAUL 195 


honestly, as we must, that Paul is hard to understand, 
and he finds a Hebrew element in his Greek. That 
is not hard to discover.t Other men have caught in 
his style the ring of other languages, the popular, the 
legal,? the tones of the mysteries? and of magic 4; 
but few have ever accused him of being literary. He 
owes more, certainly, to the Scriptures in Greek—the 
habit of making clauses balance and ring back, the 
parallelisms, the easy interchange of prose form and 
metre form, the massing of words without copula, 
familiar in Hebrew writing. 

But nearly everybody agrees that Paul’s style is his 
own, the living echo of his own mind. Paul is master 
of the common Greek dialect spoken over the Eastern 
Mediterranean, a spoken and not a literary language ; 
and in his pages it is often so near speech as to be 
dificult reading. He has a great range of living 
allusion and metaphor, not always easy for us to grasp ; 
his words and terms come to him from the lips of men 
in street and market, and come back to them and to 
us charged with a new life and personality. ‘The 
flaming individuality of his mind is all through his 
style, in the tangent, in the hyperbole (his own word). 
It may be asked whether it is only a trick of style 
when he piles up his superlatives—when to perisseuo 
(to abound) he prefixes byper- and makes verb and 
adverb of the compound byperperisseuo, hyperpertssos 
(to more-than-abound), and when he goes further still 
in heightening and says hyperekperissou or hyperek- 
perissos, or both. We must not digress here to his 
hyper- words, which in their way are as significant as 
those he makes with syn-; but we have to face the 


1 Cf. Wendland, ell. rom. Kultur, pp. 354-355. 

eB ee hints, droAttpwots (seven times), xetpdypadov, odeidn, 
5:a0yj«Kn, and his metaphors from debt, servitude and ransom. Cf. 
Deissmann, Bible Studies, p. 107. 

? Reitzenstein, He//. Myst. Re/ig., p. 51. 

“ Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, p. 303. 


196 PAUL OF TARSUS 


question whether he belongs to the order of those who 
say “awfully ” when they mean “rather.” Froude 
said something of the kind about Bunyan; he did not 
think Bunyan at all such a sinner as Bunyan did himself ; 
which was right? It depends in the case of both 
Paul and Bunyan, whether we, who judge them, are 
commonplace in our outlooks or see with genius. 
Genius sees things in colour, where the average man 
sees drab ; and that is a point to remember in estimat- 
ing Paul’s mind from his style. ‘The greater critics 
never hint a doubt of that style’s utter fidelity to his 
mind. 

We have seen how swiftly he thinks, with what 
tangents he sweeps from idea to idea ; and if the critic 
speaks of anacoluthon in the style, we shall be prepared 
for it. Modern writers have discovered that the 
employment of a stenographer may loosen style and 
obscure connexions of thought. Paul talked his 
letters; if he ever wrote one of them from beginning 
to end with his own hand, he never wrote anything 
to equal the Epistle to the Hebrews for carefully 
thought-out design, however much we set him above 
the writer of that epistle in mind and outlook. He 
talks; he yields to the inspiration of the moment ; 
and if his similes and allegories miss fire now and 
then in print, he made them effectual viva voce. Like 
good talkers, he indicates an idea and leaves you to 
develop it—and to get it fitted into what he said last 
and what he is going to say next—if he quite knows so 
long ahead. His arguments on paper, like some of 
those in the early chapters of Romans, are not equal 
to passages where he does not argue at all. In the 
epistle to the Galatians, his argument is a series of 
explosions, and every one of them tells; it is all 
cumulative. It is not easy reading; it is not strictly 
art; but it is all personality. Whatever his argument 
is, powerful as it is in Galatians, it is not that that you 
chiefly remember when he is done You have been 


THE HUMAN PAUL 197 


with a man of genius; you have swept with him from 
peak to peak, vision to vision; you have tried to keep 
pace with his moods and his subjects, indicated in the 
amazing vocabulary, the striking metaphors, the com- 
pressed word-pictures, popular phrase, Septuagint echo, 
terms of his own (which he does not always use to 
mean the same thing—a bad habit which common 
people often regret in men of genius); you have con- 
sorted with a man of elemental force, revelled in all 
the colours of God with him, mixed them (no doubt), 
wondered why he was not a poet and why he was 
so much more than any poet; and all the time you 
have been growing to love more and more the greatest 
human being that ever followed Jesus Christ and had 
Christ living in him. You and he together have been 
adding to your experience of Christ in every tangled 
sentence and involved paragraph; and you end (as 
Paul would have wished you to end) with the feeling 
that Christ is all and in all. 


Cuapter [X 
THE {LOVE OE CHRIST 


PropasLiy most readers of the New Testament take 
it in the same way and read its books in the order 
that gives them the sequence of events—a natural and 
reasonable procedure. If there had been no historical 
Jesus, there would, in spite of certain modern theorists, 
have been no church. If there had been no church, 
Paul’s Epistles would hardly have been written, and 
there is a certain logic in reading them after the story 
of his life as given by Luke. But by taking the New 
‘Testament as a whole, and in this order, the student is 
apt to miss at least one important feature of the story. 
When we realize that Paul’s letters are the earliest of 
our documents, and that, whatever stories of Jesus 
were extant in speech or even in writing, none of our 
four Gospels was written at the time of Paul’s con- 
version, and that Acts is probably later than any of 
the Synoptic Gospels and rests on authorities (as we 
have seen) of very different value, it becomes clear that 
the hardest of all periods in Church History for the 
historian to recover and to understand is that short 
interval, variously estimated between one year and 
six years, that lies between the Crucifixion and Paul’s 
journey to Damascus. 

Every man is apt to translate the decisive moment 
of his experience in the light of what he subsequently 
sees it to have meant; it carried such and such con- 
sequences with it undoubtedly; then it was what it 
produced. Perhaps; but the consequences may be 
in part due to conspiring causes. ‘The peril of auto- 


1 See Chap. III., pp. 49-51 
198 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 199 


biography is the throwing back of the developed view 
to a point when it was not developed, though likely 
to be. We have seen already—or tried to see—what 
it was in the early church that provoked the antagonism 
of Sadducee and Pharisee, and of the young Paul. We 
had to depend on indications, we had to use the known 
outlooks of schools and the later developments of Paul’s 
mind. We concluded that he saw what the effects of 
the Christian movement would be, and more quickly 
and clearly than some of its adherents, since, for one 
thing, he had a quicker and a clearer mind. 

But when we come to the very centre of our story, 
and ask, not what an opponent foresaw would be the 
outcome of Christian teaching about Jesus, but what 
that teaching actually was in the short interim under 
our survey, it is extremely difficult to answer. No one 
with any historical instinct would suggest abruptly 
attributing to that primitive community any body of 
ideas that we find at any stage of Paul’s development, 
as shown by his epistles; not even the earliest pre- 
sentment of Christ by Paul in writing can be quite 
safely referred back. Paul brought to Christ a trained 
mind and a quick intellect—gifts apparently not to be 
found in the earliest group of disciples. On the other 
hand his predecessors had known the actual Jesus, had 
spoken with him and lived with him in intimacy. 
Neither could be expected to take over the outlook 
of the other. 

If we ask, then, What was the Christology of those 
early disciples in the interim? the answer may be 
another question, Had they a Christology at all? 
Peter, as the Gospels show us, had recognized Jesus as 
the Messiah.t. Presumably the Crucifixion shattered 
that conception, which in any case must have been 
vague. Then came the Resurrection ;—but what 
exactly happened, which of the accounts as given in 
our records, written at various later dates, or what 

1 Mark viil. 27-33. 


200 PAUL OF TARSUS 


combination of data given in those accounts, we are 
to prefer—these are difficult questions and must not 
now detain us. One thing is certain from the story 
of the quarrel between the early church and Paul— 
the disciples believed that their Master lived, though 
not precisely in the form or on the terms of common 
human life. It was possible once more to believe 
him the Messiah; but a great deal of re-thinking was 
involved. ‘That the little group did not consciously 
do much re-thinking, and perhaps were not qualified 
to do it, is reasonably probable. ‘The Christology of 
the epistle attributed to James is not conspicuous ; 
the writer may be tacitly presuming more than he 
writes, but his line of exhortation does not suggest a 
mind of broad outlooks or deep reflection. How far 
that epistle can be taken to represent the views current 
among the disciples in the interim days, it is hard to 
say. One may safely guess a more living enthusiasm 
and a more infectious devotion to Jesus among them. 
For nobody could have wished to persecute an author 
so drab of mind as James; his mild rhetoric and 
humdrum good sense could have meant no danger 
to any established institution; he was no magnet to 
draw men to a rising faith. We must look elsewhere. 

Our two best fixed points are Stephen’s speech and 
Paul’s avowal to the Galatians! that he “ neither 
received his gospel of man, neither was taught it, but 
by the revelation of Jesus Christ.” Stephen’s speech, 
as we have it, appears to be recast by Luke from 
reminiscences of what Paul had told him of it, but it 
was directed to clearing up the difficulty of Jesus’ 
sufferings ; so far from invalidating the possibility of 
Jesus being the Messiah, they at least brought him 
into line with all the great exponents and repre- 
sentatives of God; all the prophets had suffered and 
been rejected. Suffering was not inconsistent with 
Jesus being the Messiah. The vision of the dying 

+ Gal. i. 12. 


THE) LOVE OF CHRIST 201 


Stephen weighed with Paul, as we saw, as possible 
evidence that the story of Jesus was not closed. A 
suffering Messiah might not after all be a contradiction 
in terms; and possibly Jesus was still living, and—a 
considerable addition—perhaps he was in fact raised 
to the right hand of God. 

But there are antecedent questions for the student of 
Paul as for Paul himself. What was the Messiah to 
be ? and what was he to do? So far we have only 
reached one point in Paul’s earlier conception of a 
Messiah, and that a negative one; the Messiah, if 
Messiah there was to be, could not be supposed to 
suffer. We have further to recognize that even this 
negative result is reached by inference. It has to be 
proved—and it will be difficult to prove—that Paul, 
before his contact with the Christian movement, 
thought much about the Messiah at all. 

For us the idea of a Messiah is embedded in the 
eventual Christian teaching ; it was almost a postulate 
with those second century Apologists, who used the 
Old Testament, its great age and its prophetic character, 
as an argument, its texts and passages, taken often in 
dreadful detachment, as an armoury. At the same 
time it must be recognized that for us, as for Greeks 
after 70 or 80 B.c., the name Christ is practically 
a synonym for Jesus and hardly connotes anything 
more. In fact, apart from Apology, the idea of a Christ 
or Messiah is merged in Jesus; or, in plainer words 
and blunter, Christendom on the whole, like that old 
Greek world, is not greatly interested in a Jewish 
Messiah. Historical research has left it an open 
question how far Judaism itself was interested in a 
Messiah. 

That a number of Apocalyptic writers dealt with a 
future Messiah is obvious; whether they took up the 
idea from the common people or launched it among 
them, it is probably impossible to say. ‘That the idea 
was widely current among the Jewish people, is not 


202 PAUL OF TARSUS 


established ; that in certain circles it was familiar is 
plain from the Apocalyptic books and from Peter’s 
famous avowal at Caesarea Philippi.1 What Peter, or 
any other ordinary person, associated with the idea, 
we hardly know, beyond the probable restoration of 
the Kingdom to Israel—which Luke says was one of 
the problems addressed to the risen Jesus and not 
answered 2—or the establishment of some kingdom, 
perhaps Davidic. For the Kingdom was the prime 
interest with the Apocalyptic writers and apparently 
with the common people; the Messiah “ only appears 
incidentally, in connection with the advent of the 
Kingdom.” ? ‘The writers of Apocalyptic were agreed 
neither as to his origin and character, whether he were 
merely human, almost divine, or pre-existent, nor as 
to what exactly he was to do; and some of them left 
him out altogether.t The writers of The Assumption 
of Moses, of Wisdom, of Fourth Maccabees, Fourth 
Ezra, and Second Baruch ignore him. So did Philo. 
A work now embodied in Enoch (chapters xxxvi.-lxxi.) 
gives the highest pre-Christian account of the Messiah 
—if the estimated date between 94 and 64 B.c. is 
correct. ‘This writer pictures the Messiah as the 
Righteous One, the Elect, and the Son of Man, possessor 
of Righteousness and of sevenfold gifts, of Wisdom 
and of the Spirit of power; he is the Revealer of all 
things, and he will recall to life the dead who are in 
Sheol and hell; he is the Judge and slays sinners and © 
unrighteousness with the word of his mouth. ‘There 
is nothing about him to make men love him; he is 
no figure like the Suffering Servant. He belongs in 
any case to no higher circle than that of the angels, and 

1'The attention of the crowds to Jesus makes nothing clear; all 
kinds of motives might outweigh ¢eir Messianic ideas, if they had 
any—-political hopes, love of novelty, all sorts of things. 

2 Acts i. 6, 7; Mark viii. 30, 31, show plainly how far removed 
was the view of Jesus from the common idea of the Messiah. 


3K. F. Scott, Te Kingdom and the Messiah, p. 41. 
“'W. Morgan, Relig. and Theol. of Paul, p. 9. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 203 


Jewish Apocalyptic as a consequence knows nothing of 
worship addressed to him.t 

Canon R. H. Charles cites some twenty passages 
from the Epistles to show Paul’s acquaintance with 
the book of Enoch; and he says outright that Paul, 
“as we know, borrowed both phraseology and ideas 
from many quarters; from the Greek poets; from 
the apocryphal writings, as the Book of Wisdom ; 
from the lost Revelation of Elias—1 Cor. ii. 9, accord- 
ing to Origen, and Eph. v. 14, according to Epiphanius. 
We shall find that he was well acquainted with and 
used 1 Enoch.” ? ‘The proof of acquaintance however 
depends on the quality as well as on the quantity of the 
parallels, and many of Canon Charles’ parallels are 
frankly very slight. On evidence as good it is suggested 
that Horace, in his second Epode, borrowed from 
Virgil’s Culex, and that Virgil returned the compli- 
ment and borrowed from the second Epode when he 
wrote his first Georgic—all on the strength of common 
features of country life described. That Paul had the 
same general outlooks as the writers of the Apocalyptic 
books #—their pessimism as to the world, their con- 
ceptions of a daemon war with God, of another world 
and a great Assize—is another thing. Even if Canon 
Charles’ parallels are real, it is not proved that Paul, 
before his conversion, was supremely or at all interested 
in a Messiah. In spite of Enoch, there were still very 
commonplace elements in the Messianic hope. When 
we are told that the transformation of the Messiah to a 
heavenly being, created before the sun and stars and 
kept by God till the fated hour, a being who shall 
descend again on the clouds and judge the nations, 

1 William Morgan, Pau/, pp. 46, 47; E. F. Scott, Kingdom and 
Messiah, p. 44. Contrast Heb. i. 4. 

2R. H. Charles, Book of Enoch (1 Enoch), p. xcix. 

® Tenney Frank, Vergi/, A Biography, p.142. Prof. Frank (pp. 56, 
136) thinks Philodemus of Gadara knew about the Messiah, and may 


have told Virgil. 
“See Chap. X., p. 232. 


204. PAUL OF TARSUS 


was laid hold of by Christians at an early stage, we can 
agree. Perhaps already in the interim they were 
preaching of Jesus as “‘ exalted to the Messianic throne, 
and of his speedy descent to judge the world and bring 
in the Kingdom”; and we can understand Paul 
resenting it. But that does not imply that he had 
himself any very definite ideas about the Messiah, or 
about any Messiah. It all depends on evidence as to 
himself, as to his group, as to Gamaliel, none of which 
is available. We are driven back to the issues, already 
discussed, which disturbed him and drove him into 
conflict with the primitive Church. Quite conceivably 
it was this conflict which first made him think seriously 
of the Messiah at all. A man may be long familiar 
with an idea—aware, at least, of the attention paid to 
it by others—before he really looks into it himself. 
Paul at all events did not proceed from books to a 
recognition of Jesus—by assessing his claims to a 
Messiahship, the marks of which Paul had previously 
determined. Books, of course, formed a part of his 
training, directly and indirectly, consciously and 
unconsciously—the Old Testament and Isaiah far 
more than any Apocalyptic books known to us. 
But such ideas as he had so acquired on Israel, 
Israel’s future, the Messiah and God’s purposes, were 
challenged, as we saw, by the new outlooks suggested 
by the Christian movement, and shattered at last by 
the shocks of Stephen’s speech, Stephen’s death and 
vision, and his own experience outside Damascus. 
There he was definitely convinced of the continuity of 
the crucified Jesus with the glorified Jesus—they were 
one and the same. Whatever he had got from books 
or men about the Messiah, whatever he now began to 
find had been said of Messiah or of Suffering Servant, 
gained a new interest and was submitted to a fresh 
examination ; it was tested by the vision at Damascus 
and in the light of the experience that followed it. 
Some of the predictions or hopes relating to the 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 205 


Messiah obviously went overboard; some, like his 
Davidic descent,! were retained—they were quite 
neutral matters now and of little or no consequence, 
but not obviously wrong. Other conceptions—and 
here might be classed those of Enoch, if we were really 
sure that Paul knew them—were of more value. But 
it was the experience that guaranteed the forecast ; 
Paul found out for himself and did not depend on 
Enoch ; Jesus was his authority. He never alludes te 
the patriarch or to his book,? so far was he from 
quoting him as he does the Old Testament and the 
book of Wisdom; and his picture of Jesus goes far 
beyond Enoch’s account of the Messiah; morally it 
is nearer the Suffering Servant. 

If a modern reader, who dabbles in Psychology, as 
we all do nowadays, asks what was the source of the 
vision, or what gave the suggestion that led to it, the 
answer is clear and certain. Paul’s mind had been 
concentrated on the historical Jesus, whom his followers 
declared to have risen from the dead. If it is remarked 
that in his letters Paul says little of historical events 
in the earthly life of Jesus, and dwells upon the cross 
and the resurrection and on his continued life and 
helpfulness, the inference is not that he was unaware 
of that earthly life or that he dismissed it as trivial. 
His whole conversion centred on the struggle to 
determine who that crucified Galilean really was. 
Everything turned, not on a proposition taken from 
a book, but on the valuing of a historical person. ‘The 
actual Jesus was the precipitating cause of the vision— 
whether we say that the risen Lord of his own volition 
showed himself to Paul, or whether we put it that 
Paul’s mind, working upon real and supposed facts, 


1] find it hard to assert on the authority of such passages as Mark 
X. 47, x1. 10, that Jesus definitely accepted the ascription of the title Son 
of David, in view of Mark xil. 35-37. 

2 It takes a brilliant and very questionable piece of emendation to 
get Enoch into 1 Peter ili. 19. Jude 14 1s a definite allusion. 


aa PAUL OF TARSUS 


and working with desperate energy, got them dis- 
tinguished finally in one tremendous moment and 
knew henceforth the great certainty. 

There followed, as we have seen, the relation of his 
new knowledge to the rest of his knowledge. We may 
certainly say that the struggle which a modern man 
with some knowledge of the mind and its habits might 
have in determining the value of the vision, Paul would 
not have—or not in the same way. Satan could trans- 
form himself into an angel of light, he held;+ and 
the question rises, Was there no dark hour in the early 
months or years after his illumination, when he asked 
himself if he had been deceived by Satan? If it was 
possible to be ‘‘ disobedient to the heavenly vision,” ? 
was it not possible to be sceptical of it? Paul is not 
ignorant of Satan’s devices,? and we can believe that 
he could have listened to Bunyan’s story in Grace 
Abounding and the Pilgrim’s Progress with more 
sympathy and more knowledge than some critics. 
How should we assume that supreme gifts exempt a 
man from supreme temptation, when in our common 
experience the enlarging circle of light involves an 
enlarging series of points of contact with darkness ? 
How was Paul to know? It is easy to say, There was 
the vision; but visions may grow dim with years. 
What was to guarantee this vision ? So far our answer 
has been that the vision was tested in obedience. 
Whatever differences in phrase and in conceptions of 
the spiritual world, whatever divergence as to purpose 
and design in the Universe and the ways of discovering 
these, may divide the ancient and the modern, we 
have to remember that in these we have only the 
tools which the mind uses, the modes in which it 
works. ‘The fundamental fact is that then as now the 
mind did work, and was stimulated to work by evidence, 
and that, whatever changes the centuries have brought, 
life and its reactions on the soul are much the same. 

Ao COL xi id. 2 Acts xxvi. 19. * 2 Cor. i. TT. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 207 


To the modern much that we find in ancient books 
and ancient ways is bizarre and odd; but when we 
meet a real mind at work, we are more impressed by 
the kinship than by our own progress. Barnabas and 
Cyprian are old and odd; Plato and Pericles are 
amazingly modern; mind belongs to every age. 

When we analyse the content of Paul’s conception 
of Christ—or, let us say now, of Jesus Christ—what 
we find may be grouped, roughly and with some over- 
lapping, in two classes, to which a third one, of deduc- 
tions, must be added. We have, first, a great mass of 
ideas as to Christ’s pre-existence and his relation to 
the Father, where, as we should indeed expect, there 
is a certain degree of indistinctness. Paul rests here 
on the teaching of his people, on Wisdom-literature, 
on Apocalyptic, on inference. It is hard to make one 
fabric of all he gives us—partly, no doubt, because 
he develops his views, as we saw, with years, and does 
so with the unevenness of so swift a genius; partly 
because, as Matthew Arnold pointed out and Clement 
of Alexandria suggested long before him,} Paul has not 
and cannot have exact knowledge of what he speaks, 
and has further no vocabulary at all adequate to what 
he wants to say ; he is “‘ throwing out ” suggestions to 
bring us to some divination of the reality, which, like 
Moses in the old story,? he sees in part, through a 
glass and darkly. In the second place, we have 
another kind of testimony, the record of a life of 
prayer, and endeavour, and (Paul would say) answer 
to prayer—a story of personal dealings with Christ 
and of experience. ‘To these we must add the influence 
of all Jesus said and did to transform the conception of 
the Messiah. In the third place, we have Paul’s 
accounts, or explanations, of what he believed and 
what he had experienced; and these are couched in 
very various language. In one place he will tell us 

1 See p. go. @ Exod. xxxlll. 17-23. 
3 Cor. xiil. 9, 12. 4 Mark viil. 30, 31. 


268 PAUL OF TARSUS 


that God appointed Jesus as a ihaoryptov and he 
steps outside our language and our ideas. ‘The term 
comes twice in the New Testament,! and where Paul 
used it the English translators rendered it “a propitia- 
tion,” while in Hebrews they translated it ‘‘ the mercy- 
seat.” When, on the other hand, Paul tells us that 
“God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto 
himself,” he makes a much more intelligible and uni- 
versal proposition, and therefore comes a great deal 
closer to our hearts. Even so his statement is not 
very easy to grasp, partly because of the difficulty 
of the subject, partly because of our habits of using 
unexamined preconceptions and of bringing to bear 
on the statement views of God which are compound 
and often not in all their factors Christian. 

Paul started his Christian life at the Damascus 
Gate, and his Christian thinking starts at the same 
point; he begins with Jesus in glory. We do not as 
a rule start there, with our canons of thought. Luther 
told his friends to “‘ begin at the wounds of Christ,” 
to “begin where Christ himself began,” viz., the 
earthly life; but Luther lived in another age. Paul 
made a different start from most of us, for the suffer- 
ing of Jesus had been his difficulty ; it is hardly ours. 
When once that problem was solved for him, and, with 
it, the question of the resurrection, by the vision of 
Christ in glory, his course was clear—a course of 
amazing light and of transcendent happiness. He can 
never get away from the wonder of it—that such a 
Being should choose to suffer, and that Paul should be 
in his mind. ‘The Son of God loved me and gave 
himself for me,” * is the keynote of all his thinking. 
Here Luther helps us, and a word or two from his 
commentary will bring out Paul’s attitude; the two 
men are together here. ‘ Christ, therefore, in very 
deed is a lover of those which are in trouble and 
anguish, in sin and death, and such a lover as gave 

2 Rom: nt. 25 ¢ Hebrix 4. 2 Gal. il. 20. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 209 


himself for us... . Read, therefore, with great 
vehemency these words Me and for me. . . . For what 
are all things which are in heaven and earth in com- 
parison with the Son of God, Christ Jesus, my Lord 
and Saviour, who loved me and gave himself for me?” } 
Nothing could be more in the vein of Paul. We 
may add other similar utterances of Paul—he “ gave 
himself for our sins”? (not the most immediately 
lucid of Paul’s sentences as it stands); since the weak- 
ness of the Law was that it did not provide for the 
frailty of the flesh, “God sent his own Son in the 
likeness of sinful flesh”? ;? he came, and “ became 
poor,” * *‘ emptied himself,” 5 and was crucified. “I] 
determined not to know anything among you,” writes 
Paul to the Corinthians, “‘ save Jesus as Christ, and 
him crucified ” ’—which was indeed to begin with the 
wounds of Christ. ‘Those wounds which had been 
Paul’s trouble before have now become his confidence. 
It is easy to string together the passages to illustrate 
how central the incarnation and the death of the 
Heavenly Christ are for Paul; but it is not so easy to 
realize what such thoughts mean, when they are to 
a man the supreme reality and the supreme motive. 
Something stands between most of us and the under- 
standing of Paul. There is a warmth, a colour, a 
personality, in Paul’s pictures of Christ, in striking 
contrast with the dim and doctrinaire figures of even 
the best Apocalyptist, and no less with the figure 
that we see across long and low planes of History, 
dimmed with the vagueness of our misty general 
conceptions. 

Everything is vivid and personal with Paul here. 
The love of Christ constraineth us,” 7 he says; “ the 


1 Luther, Commentary on Galatians, ad loc. 
* Gal. i. 43; the texts waver between trép and wept, and neither 
can be translated abruptly or without reference to other passages. 
2 Rom. vill. 3. 4:2. Cort Vili: 9. § Phil. ii. 7-8. 
* 1 Cor. il. 2. t 2 Cor. vst As 
) 


210 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Lord is near ” 31 ‘‘ Christ may dwell in your hearts ” ; # 
** to me to live is Christ”? ;* ‘* Christ liveth inames@ 
In Christ he finds consolation, loving comfort, a 
‘sympathetic spirit, kindness and compassion 5—“ for 
Christ,” as Luther comments, ‘‘ is everlasting peace, 
consolation, righteousness and life.” ‘The riches of 
Christ are unsearchable,® his love passes knowledge ; ” 
—and there a great many of Paul’s followers in all 
ages have left the matter. Notso Paul. The modern 
man of science, face to face with a Nature which 
he may call unsearchable, and, in its intricacy of 
wonder, beyond knowledge, does not leave things 
alone; he presses on to his goal, if it is always the 
more remote the nearer he comes to it; he is caught 
up in his subject and must know the utmost of it; he 
is full of it and realizes how little he has grasped its 
fullness; he is absorbed in it and lives in it. ‘This 
is true; and those who do not realize it do not 
understand the appeal and fascination of science. ‘The 
reader, who knows the New Testament, will have seen 
that I have been using the terms and phrases of Paul 
himself in this description. Then let us picture a man 
as intensely absorbed as the modern man of science, 
but absorbed in the wonder and variety of Christ— 
not in the detail of the laws of growth and reproduc- 
tion and structure of things physical, but in the 
infinite intricacies of God’s relation through Christ 
with all varieties of racial and individual experience ; 
he contemplates not only experience but possibility ; 
explores the complexity of man’s nature and gifts, 
and the unfathomed purposes and kindnesses of God, 
the whole creation in birth-pangs; and he conceives 
that everything God has so far done of wonder and 
goodness is to be eclipsed in fresh revelations. ‘O 
the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and know- 
ledge of God!” 8 ‘Who hath known the mind of 

MP RUSIV. Sy 90-8 Eph. ulate eee ab ees Gal. ii. 20. 

Bi Phas. ° Eph. iii. 8. * Eph. ii. 19..: Rom. xis $e 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 211 


the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have 
the mind of Christ.”»1. The common run of Christian 
people accept a faith once delivered to the saints— 
and it becomes a formula. Paul came, as he tells us, 
face to face with Jesus Christ, and gave the rest of his 
life to exploring him, to enjoying the zest of search 
and the joy of discovery. He lives that he may “ win 
Christ.” 

The secrets of personality are only to be made out 
and known in one way—by identification and surrender. 
In literature little can be done with criticism on 
other lines. Readers must first devote themselves, as 
Carlyle said, ‘‘ to study honestly some earnest, deep- 
minded, truth-loving Man, to work their way into his 
manner of thought, till they see the world with his 
eyes, feel as he felt and judge as he judged, neither 
believing, nor denying, till they can in some measure 
so feel and judge.” ? Among the qualities necessary 
for real understanding Carlyle sets “ lovingness”’ ; ® 
and it is here that most of us break down as critics in 
literature and still more in religion. Another thinker, 
nearer our own day, Edward Caird, Master of Balliol, 
bids us begin by accepting what we read of the man 
we would understand and reserve criticism till later. 
Here again we break down as critics. But Paul loved 
Christ and accepted him, and deliberately aimed at 
identification with him. ‘That Paul’s chief interest in 
life was to do what he was called and created to do 
—to preach the Son of God among the heathen*—1s 
plain; “‘ Woe is me if I preach not the gospel!” ® 
But he has another ambition, not obviously con- 
nected with evangelization, a more personal hope, 
“that I may know him and the fellowship of his 
sufferings’’;® that, if anything be wanting in the 
shame and suffering that Jesus bore,” he may experi- 

11 Cor. ii. 16. 2 Essay on Novalis, p. 50. 


3 Essay on Mirabeau. « Galoinrs 10. 
5 x Cor. ix. 16. 6 Phil. iii. 10. 7 Col. i. 24. 


212 PAUL OF TARSUS 


ence that himself; that he and his Saviour may know 
and share between them the whole story of human 
suffering. If he uses the phrase “‘in Christ ” again 
and again,! it does not exhaust his meaning to say that 
Christ is, as it were, the air or element in which he 
moves and has his being, true as that is. Quite apart 
from Christ within him as a factor, there is the more 
objective Christ with whom he can speak and act, 
and with whom he can share all experiences. 

We have seen how he makes compound nouns with 
the preposition syn- to describe his relations with his 
friends.2 ‘To describe his relations with Jesus he has a 
similar series of verbs :—‘‘ I have been crucified Ae. 
Christ ” ;* ‘ becoming conformed with his death ” ; 
“buried with Christ and risen with hin ?)3 2a cia 
made us alive with Christ”; ® “if we have died 
with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with 
him ” ’—a pair of verbs that he uses elsewhere of his 
friends ;* and finally the preposition three times in 
one verse—“ heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, 
if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also 
glorified together,” ® and again in yet another place, 
where, if Paul was not writing himself, his disciple 
or amanuensis re-captured his phrase, “‘ dead in sins 
He quickened us with Christ, raised us with Christ, 
seated us in heavenly places with Christ.” 1° 

Metaphor or mysticism, or whatever the term we 
may prefer to apply to this remarkable series of words 
and ideas, we may notice that the church to-day does 
little with them or with the man whose experience 
they represent. Perhaps, in an age of science and 
analysis, language that is not prosaic and literal lacks 
meaning for us. ‘The idea of identification with 


1 It is stated, variously, to come 160 or 240 times in his Epistles. 
* See Chap. VIII, p. 178. 

* Gal. ii. 20. ‘Phil. iii. 10; cf. Rom. viii. 29. 

5 Rom. vi. 4. ¢ Eph. ii. 5. 7 Rom. vi. 8. 

* 2 Cor. vil. 3. * Rom. viii. 17. 10 Eph. ii. 5-6. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 213 


Christ is carried further than we go. It could hardly 
be carried beyond this point, unless we are to use the 
language of mystery religions and of some extravagant 
experiments in Christian speech, and pretend that we 
can “‘ be deified into Apathy and become Monadic.” } 
“ Deification ”’ has not made itself at home in Christian 
thinking, though not for want of trial; and it is to be 
remembered, when we are told of the influence of the 
mysteries on Paul, that he did not use this form of 
speech; a Jew hardly could. Further, in all these 
utterances he never alludes to his baptism or to any 
sacrament. But taking what he did say, and realizing 
how little it expresses the current attitude of Christians 
toward Christ to-day, we have to admit that Paul has 
an experience of Christ that lies outside our range, and 
that till we have some closer acquaintance with it it 
will hardly be becoming for us to pronounce on what 
he found in Christ. 

Very often heathen mysticism left the initiate with 
no impulse to a higher morality—perhaps as often with 
a nature more apt than before, in its reaction, to be 
the prey of vague emotions and immoral desires. It 
is to be noticed that Paul’s identification with Christ 
is always associated with ethics and duty, with thought 
and reason—‘ we have the mind of Christ” ;3 “‘ we 
are ambitious to be acceptable to him.” 4 Everything 
must be “‘ according to Christ,” ® and in these words 
he at once sets the standard of conduct higher than 
any other teacher in that world. 

“‘ According to Christ,” on the lines of Christ— 
determined, no doubt, by the records of the earthly 
life of Jesus, though Paul does not in his letters linger 
over details or episodes of that life, but drives straight 
for the central fact—‘ the Son of God loved me and 


1 Clement of Alexandria, in an unhappy moment. 

* He nowhere alludes to his baptism, to the Lord’s Supper only in 
other connexions. Cf. p. 163. 

at Gor: iis 1G. «2 Cor. v. 9. 5 Rom. xv. 5; Col. n. 8. 


214 PAUL OF TARSUS 


gave himself for me.” 1 A life according to a Christ 
of those dimensions and of that kindness will be right. 
The same conception gives the motive. ‘“‘ The love 
of Christ constraineth us.” 2 In human history the 
great motives have been the high conception, the 
great example, and the deep personal attachment, 
and Paul’s sentence covers all three. The constant 
dwelling of the mind and the imagination upon the 
new view of God—that wider range of sympathy than 
any religious teacher had ever dared teach men to 
expect from God; the spectacle of the Son of God 
becoming poor, emptying himself, taking the form of a 
slave and dying a slave’s death, paying “‘ so costly and 
dear a price ” 8 for Paul’s salvation ; and the perpetual 
and recurrent sense of having been thought worth 
so much, of having been loved so intensely and chosen 
so individually—these are the factors that make Paul’s 
life. 

Gratitude—passionate self-giving in thankfulness 
and overpowering sense of obligation—is the “‘ necessity 
laid’? *on Paul. He is “a debtor’? > to Greekwame 
barbarian, to every man for whom Christ died; and 
whether the debt is best paid by preaching in Rome,® 
or by being a vegetarian 7 or by undergoing everything 
that came,® he will discharge the debt and in no wise 
omit it. But it is more than debt, it is privilege— 
“by the grace of God I am what lam” ;°% “to me 
who am less than the least of all saints is that grace (or 
privilege) given that I should preach among the Gentiles 
the unsearchable riches of Christ.” © Grace 1s a theo- 
logical term by now, almost a legal technicality. But 
the historian at least will remember that Paul wrote 


4 Gal. ii. 20. 8 2 Cor. v. 14. 
8 Luther’s words, cf. 1 Cor. vi. 20. — « 1 Cor. 14716: 
© Rom. 1,14. $ Rom, tae, 
vy Cor, vill. 43: 8 2 Cor. xl. 23-29. * 1 Coriguaion 


10 Eph. iii. 8.; the super-superlative eAayuororépw is a phrase so 
closely in keeping with Paul’s /Ayper words that it suggests that the 
amanuensis wrote at dictation at this point if he did not elsewhere. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 215 


before the great developments of Christian theology ; 
that Augustine borrows Paul’s language (and in Latin), 
not Paul the words of Augustine; that the use of the. 
word is an innovation of Paul’s, and that in his speech 
it is, as it was in ordinary Greek vocabulary, a peculiarly 
personal word. Paul takes the word, a word of charm 
in any case, and uses it as an epitome of all he saw in 
Christ and received from Christ; and, in case we 
make it technical, a phrase in Ephesians stands to 
remind us to bring it back to Paul’s meaning —“ grace 
on the scale of Christ’s giving.” } 

Not only the motive and impulse, but the power to 
live the life “according to Christ,” Paul finds in 
Christ. Christ is the power of God for men’s salva- 
tion.? The life of the Stoic was one of constant effort 
at self-repression and self-mastery, and the modern 
Christian’s is very often not much better. Paul, of 
course, “* presses to the mark,” and speaks of “‘ working 
out our own salvation,” of working more abundantly 
than others; but these phrases, suggestive of effort, 
do not give his central note, which is not Stoic, and 
is quite unlike our modern tone. ‘“‘ Thanks (ydpes) 
be unto God, who always causes us to triumph in 
Christ and manifests the sweetness (fragrance) of the 
knowledge of himself by our means everywhere ” ; 3 
“Thanks (ydpis) be unto God who gives us the 
victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! ... your 
labour (kdzros, toil and hard work) is not in vain in 
the Lord.” 4 Paul goes beyond victory and uses 
one of his hyper words in a famous and beautiful 
passage: “‘ Who shall separate us from the love of 
Christ ? shall tribulation? or distress? or persecu- 
tion? or famine? or nakedness? or peril? or sword? 
. . . Nay, in all these things we are more than con- 
querors’’; and he goes on to survey things of more 
moment than these—semi-spiritual beings included, 

1 Eph. iv. 7. 2 1 Cor. i. 24. 

* 2 Cor. il. 143 compare also 2 Cor.ix.15. ‘1 Cor. xv. 57, 58. 


216 PAUL OF TARSUS 


life, death, angels, principalities, powers—and sweeps 
them all aside; not they can separate us from the love 
of God in Christ.1 With these passages we should 
associate others where his mind runs on glory—Where 
the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty, and it means 
our transformation from glory to glory ; ? whom Christ 
calls, he in the end glorifies; % and he will at the last 
not only glorify us but “change our humiliating body 
to be like his glorious body ”—a parergon as it were of 
that transfiguring power, in virtue of which he “ sub- 
dues all things to himself.” 4 So “ finally, my brethren, 
rejoice in the Lord” ;5 “ ye are Christ’s, and Christ 
is God’s.” ® ‘The evidence of joy,” asks Matthew 
Arnold,’ ‘‘ who has rendered like Paul?” “ Let any 
one,” says Dr William Morgan, “compare the 
benevolence of the gods of the Oriental cults with 
the love which Paul adores in Christ, and he will 
hardly escape the feeling that the gulf between them 
is that between the mythical and the historical.” § 
When we pass on to consider how Paul conceived 
of the relation between God and Christ, one or two 
cautions are necessary. First, we have to remember 
that all we have of his writing is a collection of letters. 
One or two of them may run, like Romans, to the 
length and something of the care of a treatise; but 
they are all primarily occasional, called out by situa- 
tions or by questions. We have to remember that he 
is dealing with a problem the perplexities of which 
are not yet all exhausted, a problem where certainty 
would seem to depend on completer knowledge than 
is yet available for us. We have to remember that we 
do not in any real sense know the Christology of the 
group of Christians whom Paul found; but we may 
be sure of this at least—from a comparison of Paul’s 
own writings and from the study of Church History— 
1 Rom. vill. 35-39. 2 2 Cor. iil. 18. * Rom. viii. 30. 
¢ Phil. iti. 21. S Phil. in. 1. *: Corie, 
" Literature and Dogma, p. 260. *'W. Morgan, Paul, p. 40. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 217 


that that earliest Christology, whatever it was, was 
not Nicene and could not be. We have to remember 
that, if it was not Nicene, it was not necessarily wrong 
nor necessarily right ; that it may have contained the 
Nicene solution in germ, and also have been susceptible 
of other developments. In short, we have to remember 
what is perfectly obvious—that Paul was a pioneer, in- 
vestigating what, upon the most orthodox and Nicene 
hypothesis, Jesus could not well have explained to his 
followers, and what, so far as the historical evidence 
available serves, he did not explain. 

We must recall the fixed points with which we have 
in any case to start. Paul was a Jew, with the mono- 
theism of a Jew and a Jew’s dislike for anything that 
impinged or seemed to impinge on monotheism. He 
was face to face with apparently spiritual phaenomena, 
the explanation of which was not clear even in Wesley’s 
time—viz., speaking with tongues, the descent of the 
Holy Spirit, and what people have called miracles, 
some attributing them directly to God, others using 
the mediary processes of suggestion and so forth to 
explain them. Paul, again, was convinced that he 
had seen the glorified Jesus face to face. Finally, in 
his own life, in things more serious than the sudden 
and startling healing of diseases, he had come into 
contact with what he could only call the power of 
God. His categories, his modes of thought, his 
Psychology, and his general outlook on the universe 
were not ours, and there is no return to them possible 
for us. Such terms as spiritual, evolution, eschato- 
logical, suggestion, remind us at once of the changes 
in vocabulary that the centuries have brought and the 
changes of preconception which they imply. The 
term God ought to remind us of this equally, but it 


1Jt may be noted that, until we can finally and accurately dis- 
tinguish between natural and supernatural, the use of the word mirac/e, 
whether as a general term or with reference to a particular case, may 
be premature. 


218 PAUL OF TARSUS 


does not as a rule, and there lies our difficulty. For 
us it is charged (though we may be unaware of it) with 
a vast medley of unrelated or ill-related contributions 
derived from various strata of the Old Testament 
(prophetic, pre-prophetic, and legalistic), from Greek 
philosophy of every school from Plato to Plotinus, 
from primitive animism and from modern science, 
from Roman law and from the teaching of Jesus. The 
first step to an understanding of Paul’s views, or the 
views of the church at any stage, is to unlearn enough 
of our own certainty to be able to see and to feel as 
clearly as we can the mind of the man or the period 
we are studying. Here such a prolonged and intricate 
investigation is not possible; all that can be done is 
to give a few indications with a baldness of outline, 
that, taken aright, may be of use, and, taken amiss, 
will lead at once to inaccuracy. 

Paul’s language lends colour to the view that he 
identifies the source of spiritual manifestations in 
his early church with the Spirit, and the Spirit with 
Jesus himself.1 Nicene Christianity got the Spirit 
differentiated from Jesus; but that was at a much 
later date. What the modern church makes of the 
Spirit, when it is not merely reciting quotations, it 
is hard to say ; very little, might be the answer, if we 
were truthful. One great theologian of our day, at any 
rate, says bluntly that no original work has been done 
by the church upon the Holy Spirit since the days of 
the Apostles. Let the reader try if he can to make a 
real distinction between God and the Spirit of God, 
as men of that age thought they could. Is there 
any statement of divine action on the world or divine 
relation to the world of men, where we could use the 
one expression and not the other? ‘“ Ye are not in 
the flesh, but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwelleth 
in you. "But if any man have not the Spirit of Christ 
he is none of his. And if Christ is in you, the body is 

1 See discussion of W. Morgan, Paul, pp. 24-26. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 219 


dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of 
righteousness. But if the Spirit of him that raised up 
Jesus from the dead dwelleth in you, he that raised up 
Christ Jesus from thedead shall quicken also your mortal 
bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you.” 1 No 
Greek of the Classical day could have written a sentence 
so entangled and so perplexing. We are familiar in 
medieval theology and hymnody with almost algebraic 
balancing of terms in different senses, as in the hymn 
from J. H. Newman’s Gerontius. Paul is obviously 
doing nothing of the kind. The Spirit is here at once 
and equally the Spirit of God and of Christ, as else- 
where ; ? and the indwelling of the Spirit thus doubly 
described is also the indwelling of Christ. (A modern 
attempt to get rid of the difficulty by giving “ Spirit ” 
of Christ a small letter would not be true to the Greek ; 
that idea is conveyed by Paul as “ the mind of Christ ”’). 
Elsewhere Paul says explicitly: “The Lord is the 
Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there 1s 
liberty.” * The Spirit and the Risen Christ are for 
him practically indistinguishable—the source of the 
new life, the earnest of God’s intentions for us, the hope 
of glory, the origin of the graces of love, joy, peace 
and the rest. ‘The indwelling Christ seems to leave 
nothing distinctive for the Spirit to do or to be. 
Once more we have to recall the extreme vagueness 
and fluidity of the conception of Spirit in that age. 
We can see how no one speaking in the Spirit could 
conceivably call sia accursed.4 
In the next place, Paul does not in explicit descrip- 
tion equate God and Christ. ‘Christ is given a 
place inferior to God, and his work as Mediator and 
Reconciler is eventually traced to the Father as 
Originative cause.” God sent forth His Son ;%— 
spared not His own Son;%—it pleased the Father 
1 Rom. viil. 9-11. 2 Gal. iv. 6. #2 Cor, fil )17. 
Syeor, X34: 5 H.R. Mackintosh, Person of Christ, p. 71. 
* Gal. iv. 4. 7 Rom. vill. 32. 


220 PAUL OF TARSUS 


that in him all fulness should dwell ; 1—Christ, being 
in the form of God, did not think it a prize to be caught 
at, to be equal with God, but God has highly exalted 
him and given him a name above every name ; 2— 
Christ is God’s ; 3—and the head of Christ is God, as the 
head of the woman is the man.‘ Finally, there is the 
strange verse in the Resurrection chapter, to which 
verse we have not the key: ‘ Then shall the Son also 
himself be subjected to him that did subject all things 
unto him, that God may be all in all.” 5 

Yet at the same time, when it comes to the work of 
Christ in the present-day world, Paul assigns to Christ 
the same functions as to God and the same attributes, ® 
and transfers to Christ words used in the Old Testament 
of God. He derives his apostolate from God or from 
Christ.?, His favourite term for Christ, ‘‘ the Lord,” 
was a Septuagint name for God—a more significant 
fact than its use by contemporary pagans for their gods. 
Every knee is to bow to Jehovah, says the second 
Isaiah ; to Christ Jesus, says Paul, and says it twice.8 
To Christ he transfers the words of Joel: ‘“‘ Whosoever 
shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.” ® 
He describes believers as those who call on the name of 
the Lord Jesus 1°—a recognition that men did actually 
address prayer to Jesus, and surely an acceptance of 
their practice, though it is pointed out that the usual 
expression among New ‘Testament writers is that 
prayer is addressed to God in Christ’s name. ‘To 
clinch this, we have the famous passage of the “‘ thorn 
in the flesh”?:™ ‘* For this thing I besought the Lord 
thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said 


ot Gs Fy ys eB 2 Phil. ii. 6, 9. 
* x Cor, 11. 23. Act Corrie: 
Spor xy.28, * See W. Morgan, Paul, pp. 43 ff. 


7 Compare Gal. i. 15, and 2 Cor. v. 18 (God’s call), with 2 Cor. 
x. 8, xiii. 10 (the Lord). 

* Isa. xlv.' 23% SPhil/o 303) Romy xiv. ke 

® Rom. x. 13; Joel il. 32. 

10 W. Morgan, Paul, pp. 44, 45. 11 2 Cor. xii. 8 ff. 


THE LOVE OF CHRIST 221 


unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee; for my 
strength is made perfect in weakness.” ‘The sentences 
that follow show plainly who “ the Lord” is. ‘* Most 
gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, 
that the power of Christ may rest upon me. ‘There- 
fore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in 
necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s 
Samed 

Of the three points which we have noticed, this 
identification of function and attribute is much the 
most significant, especially in view of the short interval 
of time between the crucifixion and Paul’s writing. 
The historian will ask how it came about; the philo- 
sopher will ask what is its validity or what is its value. 
At the centre of it all was the reconciliation with God— 
** God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself ”’ ; 
the peace with God—*“ therefore being justified by 
faith, we have peace with God” ;1 the new creation, 
the new life, and the new evidence of power. If we 
might borrow a modern word from another field, the 
power of God, God Himself, was liberated in Christ. 
All this was nothing without God. Paul, like our- 
selves in being without a key to all the mysteries of 
personality, proceeded from Jesus to God, and found 
no difference in mind or nature. Whatever may be 
said on the technical side of Theology—particularly 
where our conceptions are insufficiently analysed and 
remain compound and indistinct—there is a strong 
defence for Paul’s movement of mind. He finds God 
and Christ equivalent in function ; he finds love (not 
a vague general benevolence, but a personal attach- 
ment to the individual) the moving principle of Christ 
and God; he sees the world shaken by a new power 
in the preaching of Christ; and he goes forward to 
a practical conclusion, which those will count invalid 


1Rom. v. 13 the indicative is surely confirmed against the 
subjunctive, in this passage, even if scholars will not allow us to use 
the constant thought of Paul, by verse ro, “ we were reconciled.” 


222 PAUL OF TARSUS 


who have not his experience and who are content with 
preconceptions. ‘The Christian church, perhaps before 
him, certainly after him, has accepted that conclusion, 
and where it has used that conclusion in life and 
action, it has had again the evidence that Paul had— 
fresh experience of power and the happiness of resting 
upon a real love at the heart of things. Where it has 
modified that conclusion, its appeal to mankind, its 
belief in God, and its own power of work and happiness, 
have flagged. Such evidence demands of course to be 
tested, as does all genuine evidence on matters of 
vital import ; our deductions from it need perpetual 
examination. But what underlies the facts of Chris- 
tian experience? After all the love of Christ still 
constrains men, and the conclusion is hard to resist that 
God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. 


CHAPTER X 
THE CONSUMMATION 


Or late years a new and intenser study has been given 
to Apocalyptic writers and to their ideas; and, as 
happens when a new subject absorbs attention, very 
different opinions are held as to the part played by 
these writers in shaping religious thought in their day 
and, more particularly, their influence upon the whole 
Christian movement and upon Jesus himself. On the 
one hand, we are shown a Jesus very much on a level 
with the average mind of his day—and, one is tempted 
to say, not quite on a level with the average intelligence 
of our own day, still less of Plato’s day,—and we are 
told we must repeat Paul’s experience and know 
Christ after the flesh no more; the historical Jesus is 
no longer to be very much of a help to us.t_ On the 
other hand, we are told that the best thing we can do 
with the Apocalyptic writers is to forget them. In 
most controversies of the kind there is a middle way— 
very often several middle ways, some of which may 
mean nothing and one of which may lead us aright. 
“If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are 
of all men most miserable,” said Paul.2 Some forward 
look is involved in any serious attempt to make one 
universe of God’s doings. But we might not be much 
less miserable, if we were tied down to the feeble fore- 
casts and the tribal conceptions of God offered to us 
by Jewish Apocalyptic. In any case, whatever other 
canons are valid, it is surely certain that it is the worst of 
bad criticism to attribute one man’s ideas to another, 
1 See Schweitzer, Quest of Historical Fesus, p. 399. 


8; Cor. xv. 19. 
223 


224 PAUL OF TARSUS 


when one of the pair is commonplace and the other 
a genius; the sin against sense is not to be forgiven 
on the plea that both used the same words. Words, 
in spite of dictionaries, never mean the same thing. 
The observation of Heraclitus that ‘‘ All is flux,” that 
we never step into the same river twice, applies to 
words also. 

We are told that “with both feet Paul stands on 
primitive Apocalyptic ground. . . . In Apocalyptic 
his preaching of redemption has, in part at least, its 
background.” + He thinks, we are told, in terms of 
two worlds; he stands in the old and evil age, and looks 
with eager longing to the new, pessimistic about the 
old, hopefulastothenew. Nature, all of it, is involved 
in sin and ruined by it; all have sinned; in the flesh 
there is nothing good; and Nature groans in concert 
with man’s ruin. This is an age of death, itself the 
outcome of man’s sin. Round man are daemon powers 
at war with God—though in truth this particular 
belief has no special connexion with Apocalyptic, as 
the belief in spirits is world-wide and in most regions 
they are considered to be generally evil. Eventually 
God is to win, Satan is to be cast underfoot, and a 
new era is to begin. And all this, so far from being 
philosophic, belongs not to the domain of reasoned 
thought, but of mythology. The war, the daemons, 
the Messiah, the world-catastrophe—it is all mytho- 
logical drama. 

Perhaps this is all true, and yet not all the truth. 
Perhaps the gifted writer, whom I| have been quoting, 
has forgotten what Plato says about his Myths.?_ It will 
not be a sufficient retort that Plato knew his Myths 
to be Myths,—not myths in our common English 
sense; and that Paul took his to be Gospel truth. 
“*T do not mean to affirm that the description, which I 
have given of the soul and her mansions, is exactly true 


1 See W. Morgan, Paul, pp. 11-15. 
* Plato, Phaedo, 114 (Jowett). 


THE CONSUMMATION 225 


—a man of sense ought hardly to say that. But I do 
say that inasmuch as the soul is shown to be immortal, 
he may venture to think not improperly or unworthily, 
that something of the kind is true.” Sosays Plato. Let 
us imagine Paul confronted with the quiet judgments of 
some scholars of our day, of another type from those 
so far quoted. One tells us—and him—that “ it does 
not appear that any one of the attempts to bring 
the teachings of St Paul into perfect harmony is 
altogether successful. The likelihood is that he had 
not attained to the goal of his thinking on this 
subject.”1 Another says it is “impossible to get a 
systematic scheme of eschatology out of Paul.”? A 
third says that ‘‘ Paul has no eschatology . . . he has 
never approached the subject in a systematic fashion,” 
he does not give us material for a scheme nor attempt 
to reach such a construction himself. What would 
Paul have said? Can any one have entered into 
Paul’s mind and nature, or read the letter to the 
Philippians 4 with any intelligence, and not feel that 
Paul would have laughed and admitted the indictment, 
that he would have quoted the Phaedo if he had known 
it, and that he would have swept clear of pictures and 
scenes, and emphasized the exceeding greatness of 
Christ’s power, and perhaps struck off a new expression 
of his conviction that “ He must reign” ?5 Let his 
background have been Apocalyptic—two worlds, the 
present evil world, the good age to come, cataclysm, 
catastrophe, judgment—the daemon-world of every 
animist into the bargain—he talks experience, and the 
Apocalyptic writers guess-work; they dream ; he has 
lived and has his feet on something solider than any 
world of theirs. 


1 Leckie, World to Come, p. 181. 

* Stevens, Theology of New Testament, p. 482. 

3H. A. A. Kennedy, Paul and Last Things, p. 21. 
“Phil. i. 12-16. 

Cor. x¥..3.5; 


226 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Professor Kennedy 1 offers us a key to the discussion 
when he points out that men represent the Last 
Things to their minds by pictures, which stamp them- 
selves on the imagination; the pictures are out- 
grown in thought, but being pictures they haunt the 
imagination and remain, rough working instruments of 
thought, while their content, their value and significance 
are undergoing change, till at last they mean something 
quite different. Paul starts with his contemporaries, 
hears the same sort of account of the things of God and 
History, perhaps reads some of the same books, uses the 
same language; but, once more, genius and experience 
make all the difference. 

Paul was confronted with the same problem as the 
Apocalyptic writers. ‘There are ages when things go 
well with the world —or, to be more exact, with 
nations,—or, at least, with those classes in the nations 
who write the books and who shape the thoughts, 
never (it should be added) without some relation to 
the general feeling of their own people and perhaps 
others. ‘Then one world sufices—“ the world went 
very well then.” There are other ages of breakdown, 
some of which may be compared (the comparison is 
made by Paul and the fourth Gospel #) to a scene of 
child-birth ; will the mother live—or that civilization 
survive, that is the nidus of real life? Or will the 
mother die, and nothing survive but the child—a new 
start, with all to learn at the old cost, a waste terrible 
to the mind of any who understands? Is all to be 
washed away that man has built upon the floodbanks ? 
Is all in vain? Is there to be perceptible again any 
principle of right in human things—and triumphant ? 
The easy dogma of natural, inevitable and effortless 
Progress, is quite modern,’ as Professor Bury has 


1 Paul and Last Things, p. 36. 

* John xvi. 21; cf. Rom. viii. 22. 

* Perhaps it is not now widely held outside the United States, that 
home of lost causes, forsaken beliefs and impossible loyalties. 


THE CONSUMMATION 227 


shown ;! it is due to confusion of ideas; it omits 
important factors; it forgets that History denies one 
of its main elements, for progress has never been effort- 
less; it forgets the sheer devil in the human heart. 
It is easy to talk of the swing of the pendulum, to say 
cheerily that things will right themselves. ‘There are 
the histories of long ages to be read, when things did 
not right themselves. It is just as possible for a human 
society continuously to decline as continuously to 
advance.2 There is no known guarantee in Nature, 
or in human nature, that a positive end of folly and 
degeneracy must some day be reached. Optimists 
may hold that a bottomless pit must have a bottom 
somewhere; the question is, has it? And there is 
yet another question, Would that bottom be a sound 
foundation for a regenerated society, for the City of 
God or any modern equivalent of it ? 

When such thoughts come over the thinking por- 
tion of a people, something must be found once more 
to inspire effort. ‘The Apocalyptists—to their credit, 
and in spite of their triviality and tiresomeness— 
recognized that the Prophets were right, and that 
there is still God in the world—or, perhaps, rather, 
outside it, but still in the scheme of things. ‘Then, 
as Jeremiah saw,? God is not to be permanently 
baffled by human folly and wickedness; He has 
probably more shots in His locker than He tells us, 
another card in His hand which we have forgotten. 
(The Greek poet Sophocles at least suggests that God’s 
dice always fall favourably for His game.) If He puts 
His hand to the human race, depend upon it He has a 
purpose, which nothing will stop Him carrying through. 
If we can discover that purpose, and work for it, 
nothing we do can be in vain; or, if human forces 
against us are too strong, then God Himself will step 


1Jn his book, Tze Idea of Progress, 1920. 
* As for instance in many states of Latin America. 
© yer. xxxi, 31. 


228 PAUL OF TARSUS 


in and close the game; one way or other, the arm of 
the Lord will be revealed. He is not tied down to one 
world as we are; He who made this world can make as 
many more worlds as He needs to mature His purpose. 
He has only to speak, and it is done. 

It has been suggested that Apocalyptic gives us a 
Jewish philosophy of history,1 a Semitic philosophy of 
religion 2—“‘ an attempt to see the world steadily and 
to see it whole, to unify the physical world, the moral 
world, and the political world, the world, that is, 
of the national destiny of God’s chosen people.” § 
This is well put—it is such a philosophy of history as 
is possible with one intractable reservation ; nationalist 
dogma ran through all. For this reservation there was 
a twofold apology no doubt, resting on dogma and 
in a degree on experience. Apocalyptic, in short, 
as Professor Burkitt says of one apocalypse, “like so 
many things that come down to us from the Jews, is 
a strange mixture of hope and despair, of prejudice 
and insight.” Noconsistent account of History, past 
and future, can be made of the data of the various 
writers of Apocalypses; they were not bound to any 
particular general outline, they were not exponents 
of any standardized doctrine; if they are related, it 
is by borrowing and adaptation. Nor is it always 
easy to make a unity of what a single writer gives us, 
even when it is definitely certain that a book as we 
receive it is really the work of one author and not, 
like Enoch, pieced together out of fragments of various 
books. Certainty, definition of outline, agreement 
are hard enough for historians to achieve with docu- 


1F. C. Burkitt, Fewish and Christian Apocalypses, p. 7, referring 
to Daniel in particular. 

*R. H. Charles, Eschatology, p. 182. 

* F.C. Burkitt, op. cit., p. 21, of Exock. 

- ROG BUrkitt, of. ct/.,.40, of the Assumption of Moses. Cf. R.'T. 
Herford, The Pharisees, p. 191, “ Apocalyptic uses the words of hope 
but its message is despair, despair of all human means for establishing 


the Kindgom of God on earth. . . .” 


THE CONSUMMATION 229 


ments and evidence before them; for prophets who 
rest on intuition, inference, dogma and sheer fancy, 
they are obviously impossible. 

Some of their data the Apocalyptic writers draw 
from the Prophets—“ the day of the Lord,” for 
instance, as a crucial and central factor in all history, 
God’s universal sway and survey, the conception of 
some final adjustment of world and fact to God’s 
ideals, and sometimes of a Servant of the Lord who in 
some way may be instrumental in God’s final triumph. 
These ancient contributions of the Prophets to the 
picture include, it would appear, no clear reference 
to the individual man, no message of light for him.} 
Yet the individual could not be kept out, and in time 
he made himself felt in all Apocalyptic forecast. What 
was morality, if there were no individual in God’s 
scheme of things? Men of light minds may still talk 
of national morality and corporate thinking, but 
behind such conceptions and more real is the man who 
is moral and who thinks, or the man who is not inter- 
ested in morality or thought. Even the Prophets had 
to deal with the individual ; whatever they say of the 
nation, they were confronted by the man whose father 
had eaten sour grapes ; would his own teeth be set on 
edge? Jeremiah, in his most famous passsage, looked 
clear past the nation to the day when every individual 
man would know the Lord and have the Lord’s words 
written in his heart and need no brother to tell him 
to obey them ; it would be a New Covenant indeed.? 
The early church was quick to see how the prophecy 
could be used, and here at least their use of the Old 
Testament was not independent of its meaning. 

When all the world had justice done to it, it was 
clear to the Israelite that Israel’s day would come; 
there would be a Kingdom of Israel all over the world, 
brought in by an anointed Servant of God, perhaps 
of David’s line—though the Maccabaeans, who seemed 


1R. H. Charles, Eschatology, p. 178. 2 Jer. xxxi. 31. 


230 PAUL OF TARSUS 


to promise the fulfilment of this prophecy, were not 
Davidic, but perhaps (more vaguely) of the order of 
Melchizedek.! But what became of the dead Israelite, 
who had all his life looked for the coming of this 
Kingdom—was he to be disappointed? No! he 
was to come in; and he came in and brought confusion 
with him. He was presumably not lost,—he was in 
some way so far immortal—he would need a body, 
however, for the Kingdom, and he would receive it ; 
there would be Resurrection. But one individual 
can never be treated alone; admit one case and ten 
thousand appeals follow. Here is the Kingdom of 
the Messiah,? an earthly Paradise, in which the return- 
ing dead share, endowed with new bodies receptive 
of mundane joys; and all the ten thousand appeals 
have to be settled. So there is obviously a Last 
Judgment and cases are heard and decided—and, of 
course, with absolute Justice. Not all Israelites, but 
good Israelites are admitted. ‘The just alone shall rise, 
some said. Others drew a more fair conclusion—all 
men shall rise and all men shall be judged; which 
in the end must imply that there is no particular 
Kingdom of Israel. ‘The attempts at a mundane King- 
dom all miscarried ; and after all it was perhaps a little 
ludicrous—at least to people conversant with Greek 
ideas, this earthly Kingdom full of people with new 
bodies. The Kingdom became spiritualized in some 
way, and its standard features were all in turn slurred 
over or lost; perhaps there would be a temporary 
Kingdom on earth to be followed by Judgment and 
Heaven. But now the thing became purely spiritual, 
and universal; it was to be in heaven, no new bodies 
were needed, immortal spirits were enough, or by way 


t Psalm cx. 

* For what follows see W. Fairweather, Background of the Gospels, 
Chap. VII.; J. H. Leckie, World to Come, Chaps. II. and III.; 
W. Morgan, Pau/, Chap. 1.3; H. A. A. Kennedy, Paul and Last 
Things, pp. 59-76. 


THE CONSUMMATION 231 


of compromise living and dead alike should receive 
spiritual bodies. ‘Thus Resurrection yields to Im- 
mortality, the Jewish to the Greek idea. In heaven 
it could hardly be a Davidic Kingdom ; so David’s son 
has a tendency to be eliminated ; and in fact, if it be, 
really and fundamentally, Immortality, it is hard to 
see what part or duties can be assigned to any Anointed 
One—unless perhaps he eventually judge quick and 
dead; but if good and bad are distributed to their 
proper spheres at death—and even these are (in the 
judgment of some) interim spheres—the Messiah’s 
functions seem very limited. Consequently, as we 
have seen, the Messiah drops out of some of the books 
altogether; and a bodily resurrection logically drops 
out too—the Book of ‘Fubtlees, Wisdom and Philo ignore 
it. In short, the ethical predominates over the 
national interest, and a universal doctrine of Immor- 
tality really makes all the old apparatus mere lumber. 
But theological lumber is as hard to get rid of as 
any lumber ; association may endear an old doctrine, or 
an old expression of a doctrine, as deeply and as surely 
as it will a piece of old furniture, a personal relic. 
“Only a woman’s hair” Swift had written on a little 
packet found after his death in his desk ; was it worth 
keeping? Perhaps not, for anybody else. Perhaps 
the forms, in which one’s father expressed the beliefs 
on which his character was founded, may come to look 
old and inadequate; but for his son, whatever ex- 
pression he might personally prefer, the old formula, 
the old words, carry something of the man he knew; 
and he will not readily respond to the cry, “‘ New lamps 
for old.” In the Arabian tale it was the new wife 
who responded to it and made the fatal exchange. 
What attention, if any, Paul paid to Apocalyptic 
books before his conversion, we do not know. It is 
quite clear, as said already, that they did not for him 
stand at all on a level with the Canonical books. It 
1 See Chap. IX., p. 205, 


232 PAUL OF TARSUS 


is easier to suppose that he was familiar with some 
doctrine of Immortality or Resurrection than it would 
be to maintain the opposite; it is obvious. But this 
does not imply either knowledge of particular books 
or any particular theory. Once again, his views owe 
more to the vision of the Risen Jesus than to any book, 
and the conclusion seems clear that behind all his 
pictures of another world is the glimpse he had of it 
on the road to Damascus. ‘That is his starting-point, 
and anything derived from books or teachers must 
thereafter be adjusted to what he had himself ex- 
perienced. ‘Then he begins to frame his own scheme 
of Last Things, his own philosophy of history and of 
religion. In the centre of it all is the Incarnation 
of the Son of God with his Crucifixion and Resurrection 
—not conjectural points, not removed to a greater 
or less distance from this present age, but actual events 
that came under the eyes of men and women still 
living. What became of the conjectural schemes then 
of Apocalyptists ? When these amazing facts of God’s 
love of the world—of God’s love of Paul—are thrust 
before a man’s eyes, they must become the prime facts 
of any philosophy of religion or history that he shapes 
for himself. If certain features of Apocalyptic remain 
—the badness of the present age, does one really need 
to go to Apocalyptic to be told that an age that cruci- 
fied Jesus is not ideal? Immortality—can Apocalyptic 
supplement or confirm the Damascus vision? ‘The trans- 
formation of the age—when Paul has experienced it 
in himself and seen it in his friends and in his churches ? 
All that Apocalyptic has really to contribute is the 
Second Coming of Christ; and to a man for whom 
the cleavage between right and wrong was more 
drastic than for any Apocalyptist, for whom any end 
to things but the utmost victory of Christ was unthink- 
able, it must sooner or later have been clear that 
whatever steps remained to complete that victory 
Christ would take. ‘The form or picture was perhaps 


THE CONSUMMATION 233 


suggested by Apocalyptic; the value of it came from 
elsewhere. The content of all that he says comes 
from Christ. Here as elsewhere he might plead for 
the newness of spirit as against the oldness of the 
letter.* 

It is not clear how far Paul was influenced in things 
eschatological by the teaching of Jesus. A good deal 
is said in the Gospels—and a good deal more is made 
of it by some readers—which might imply that Jesus 
shared the Apocalyptic view. As we have seen, it is 
urged that Jesus held that view so centrally as to make 
him unserviceable for the religious life of to-day.? 
But Matthew Arnold’s dictum of long ago is still 
unrefuted ; Jesus was above his reporters. Paul, 
coming into the Christian community without their 
personal experience of the Master on earth, was 
naturally dependent on their reports. His early 
preaching did contain a reference to the return of 
Jesus and apparently an early return. He wrote 
explicitly of it to the Thessalonians. ‘“‘ If we believe 
that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also 
which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For 
this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we 
which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord 
shall not precede them which are asleep. For the 
Lord himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, 
with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump 
of God ; and the dead in Christ shall rise first. ‘Then 
we which are alive and remain shall be caught up 
together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in 
the air; and so shall we be ever with the Lord.” 3 
It is not needful here to discuss the difficult question 
of the relations of the two epistles to the Thessalonians ; 
both appear to be genuine, and they seem to be con- 
temporary. In the second, there is an added touch: 4 

1 Rom. vii. 6. 2 See page 223. 3 1 Thess. iv. 14-17. 

42 Thess. 1. 7-103; for the quotations see Appendix to Westcott 
and Hert. 


234 PAUL OF TARSUS 


“The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with 
his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on 
them that know not God and that obey not the gospel 
of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall be punished with 
everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord 
and from the glory of his power, when he shall come 
to be glorified in his saints and to be admired in all 
them that believe.” ‘The passage is a curious mosaic 
of small phrases from different parts of the Septuagint. 

Probably nothing in Paul is so thoroughly typical of 
the mind of his contemporary Christians as the picture 
given in these two passages. It is significant that he 
does not repeat it in later letters. ‘The whole tone 
of his mind more and more impresses an attentive 
reader with the feeling that the Thessalonian passages 
are somehow not the real Paul+—certainly not the 
ultimate Paul. If the passages came in Jude’s epistle, 
they would give no surprise. Paul does not give up 
the return of Christ, but he seems with time to have 
felt it to be of less immediate interest ; and he discards 
the Old Testament picture language. 

A comparison and a contrast will make this clear. 
To the Romans he writes of the reward of the good 
and patient in eternal life, and of the “ indignation 
and wrath, tribulation and anguish ” predestined for 
those who fight against truth.2 Jesus and Plato had 
said as much. ‘The stress is on the sheer facts of the 
case and their bearing on morality and honesty : ‘‘ God 
will judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ.” ? We 
have seen already how intimate a thought, how deep 
a conviction, of Paul’s this certainty of judgment had 
been from the beginning, how vital a factor in that 
upheaval which led to his conversion. ‘‘ We must all 
be exhibited before the judgment seat of Christ,” is 
a thought which he never lost. But the tone is not 
that of the letters to the Thessalonians; the note 

1 I do not mean that they are interpolations. 

* Rom. ii. 7-9. * Rom. ii. 16. 


THE CONSUMMATION 235 


is deeper. In the chapter which he writes to the 
Corinthians he might have repeated the earlier picture ; 
it is noticeable that he does not, and it is worth while 
to ask why. He says emphatically that flesh and blood 
cannot inherit the Kingdom of God, nor corruption 
incorruption; the heavenly body will be different 
somehow from the earthly—it will be spiritual, and 
there he leaves its description; and he continues: 
*“‘ Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all 
sleep (z.¢. we shall none of us sleep), but we shall be 
changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at 
the last trump. For the trumpet shall sound, and 
the dead shall be raised incorruptible and we shall be 
changed.” Death has lost its sting, the grave will lose 
its victory; ‘‘ but thanks be to God which giveth us 
the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.””1 There 
is a distinct change in handling; he is laying more 
emphasis on the fundamental and is less interested in 
the manner.? Perhaps he is less certain that the picture 
is as true as it might be; he is surely clearer that it is 
not after allof first importance. Itisfurther suggested ® 
that he found preoccupation with the Second Coming 
and its phaenomena to militate against that concentra- 
tion on life and reality which is one part of a Christian’s 
essential business for God. He believed in people 
working; he told the Thessalonians so at the time.4 
They may be going to live to see the Lord come on the 
clouds; they had better go about their daily duties. 
Once more it is a preference for sense and for the 
fundamental. Meantime he has comfort for those 
anxious about what they supposed to be the fatally 
premature departure of their loved ones; they were 


11 Cor. xv. 43-57. 

2 Cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, Paul and Last Things, p. 196, “ an almost 
complete lack of scenery ” in Paul’s presentment of the Second Coming, 
in contrast with Apocalyptic writers. 

’ Hastings Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 209. 

42 Thess. iii. 6-14. 


236 PAUL OF TARSUS 


safe with God; he believes in the soul and its 
immortality, whatever his view of resurrection. 

The discussion so far shows us what we have seen in 
other regions of our study—a Paul who inherits ideas, 
who responds to the preconceptions of his environment, 
but who more and more bases himself on experience. 
Men had the picture of the Messiah on the clouds as 
they had that of a reigning Israel. Paul has faced a 
living Christ ; and in a life, which did not grow slacker 
but intenser, he has tested the life of Christ—does he 
live, does he reign, has he the power, does he achieve ? 
Paul is loyal to the fact discovered in all the experi- 
ments he records. He does not discard all he has 
inherited; perhaps he believed to the end what he 
told the Thessalonians, that Christ would come on the 
clouds and we should meet him in the air, just as from 
affection he held on to the idea that Israel has still 
some function of importance in God’s universe. But 
his great convictions are far more closely in touch with 
the experience of the Church in all ages; Israel may 
have a part to play, though that has grown less likely 
with the centuries; the Second Coming may take the 
form that ancient dreamers gave it; perhaps—but 
one thing admits of no perhaps: ‘‘ He must reign.” # 
The words sum up the real eschatology of Paul, and 
they are the fruit of his experience. 

He is as convinced as any Apocalyptic writer that 
God does not improvise. God had a plan, which God 
kept to Himself till the hour came—a plan which 
embraced everything and everybody that God had 
ever thought of, a plan with no gaps and no after- 
thoughts. So much was bound up even with the 
Greek conception of a vague Providence; how much 
more with the God who has been made known by a 
Hosea, a Jeremiah, a second Isaiah—Whose nature has 
been shown by Jesus? ‘“‘ Before the foundation of the 
world ” God foresaw and foreordained its story—and 

1 E.g. 2 Cor. xi. 23 ff. ‘1 Cor. xvate 


THE CONSUMMATION aa] 


chose His agents,! Paul among them. ‘To people who 
have no clear notion at all what they are doing in the 
world, Paul’s conviction that God ‘set him apart, 
from his mother’s womb” ? is of course unintelligible. 
It is a conviction that other men have shared before 
and after Paul, from Jeremiah onwards ;* and if Paul 
and Paul’s outlooks are to be understood, that con- 
viction must be recognized as central. Many impulsive 
people have felt the same thing, and there has been 
some conspicuous contrast betweén their belief and 
the ends they proposed, or the character with which 
they thought of doing things, or the effect they pro- 
duced in the world—a contrast so strong that it has 
been clear to quieter minds that God never chose such 
persons and never harboured such purposes. But 
Paul is one of the men against whom such criticism 
cannot be brought. His certainty that God has a plan 
for the universe rests not merely on Jewish dogma 
about God, a deduction from a syllogism about omni- 
science, but on a consciousness that God had a plan 
for Paul, not of Paul’s choice or devising, which was 
carried through all against Paul’s initial wishes, and 
was justified. We also have to admit with History 
before us that this conviction of Paul has been justified 
by the experience of nineteen centuries. 

We start then with Paul’s belief in a plan of God’s 
for the world—‘ that nothing walks with aimless 
feet ”’—with his belief, much like that of Jeremiah,‘ 
that Israel, for all Israel’s waywardness and folly, will 
never really succeed in wrecking God’s plan—no, nor 
Satan nor any other prince of the power of the air, 
nor any combination of principalities and powers, even 
if evil men, getting worse and worse,’ coppersmiths ® 
and emperors,’ join with them. Paul may be in bonds, 


“but the Word of God is no prisoner.” ® If he is 


1 Eph. 1. 4. * ral 1rd. ayer i, 
4 Jer. xxxi. 31. S 2p limit 4 *2 Tim. iv. 14. 
? 2 Tim. iv. 17. *2 Tim. ui. 93 cf. Isa, ly. 11. 


238 PAUL OF TARSUS 


asked for his evidence, it begins with the ludicrous 
failure of the spiritual and social leaders of Israel, re- 
inforced by a young man from ‘Tarsus in Cilicia, to 
stamp out the church of Christ when it was a mere 
handful of trivial people in Jerusalem, when (to a 
historian looking back) its theology was elementary 
and contradictory and doomed to collapse at the first 
touch of Jewish learning or of Greek thought. ‘The rest 
of his evidence was of the same kind—a mass of experi- 
ence that no man could have foretold, all shot through 
with one note of incredible triumph—vzepyixope,} 
all full of proof of the presence of God in His power 
and His wisdom. Jewish Apocalyptic has nothing of 
the kind to offer—nothing even distantly like it, except 
the struggling survival of Judaism. 

Paul inherited the spiritual experience of Israel, and 
he is right in emphasizing the immense value of it; he 
had read the story of patriarch and prophet with 
keener eyes and a more responsive heart than any 
Apocalyptist—with the eyes and the heart of genius, 
and none of them can claim anything beyond medio- 
crity. His Christian experience showed him that the 
thread, which they believed somehow to run through 
history, was indubitably there, and of far stronger 
texture than any of them could have guessed; they 
had never tried to snap it, they had never been bound 
and tied up with it, as he had. He was the heir of 
the prophets, and he knew, in virtue both of genius 
and experience. He inherited the prophetic sense of 
God, as we saw from the beginning of our study—the 
realization of God’s righteousness and attention and 
power; and he tested what he inherited and made 
it his own. ‘There was indeed a vital force running 
through all history, and nothing that the prophets had 
read in the nature of God was lost. All was con- 
firmed and developed in Jesus Christ and brought to 
a tremendous and splendid certainty. ‘The Crucifixion 

1 Rom. vill. 37. 


THE CONSUMMATION 239 


had proved to be the confirmation of all, the evidence 
of triumph ; God’s character was known now and His 
great plan was being revealed. 

The crowning sorrow of every prophet, the problem 
of every apocalyptist, was Israel’s rejection of God, 
of God’s ideas and of God’s law, with the awful narrow- 
ing down of God’s triumph that it involved. God 
would indeed win the victory over the devil and his 
angels, but a Pyrrhic victory; He would come out 
of the fray conqueror with a mere handful of His 
forces ; they were few who should be saved, a remnant, 
and the vast masses of mankind that were to have been 
his auxiliaries were the hopeless prey of Satan, swept 
into Gehenna with their captor, lost to God. ‘“ Now 
I see,” we read in Fourth Ezra, “‘ that the coming age 
shall bring delight to few but torment to many.” ? 
The Apocalyptist pleads that the Most High is called 
compassionate, gracious, long-suffering, and forgiving ; 
and the reply comes, “‘ This age the Most High has 
made for many, but the age to come for few. ... 
Many have been created, but few shall be saved.” 2 
“Il saw and spared some with great difficulty, and 
saved me a grape out of a cluster, and a plant out of 
a great forest. Perish then the multitude which has 
been born in vain; but let my grape be preserved 
and my plant which with much labour I have per- 
fected.” * It is suggested that the nations (except a 
few individuals 4) deliberately rejected the Law of 
God;° “they even affirmed that the Most High 
exists not.” ® If, as is evident, it is hard for a man to 
understand God’s doings, ‘‘ how should it be possible 
for a mortal in a corruptible world to understand the 
ways of the Incorruptible?”7 “It would have been 
better,”’ reflects the Apocalyptist, “ that we had never 
been created than having come (into the world) to 

14 Ezra vil. 47. 2 4 Ezra viii. 3. 3 4 Ezra vii. 21, 22. 

44 Ezra iii. 36. 5 4 Ezra vil. 23, 24. *4 Ezra vii. 23. 

* 4 Ezra iv. 11. 


240 PAUL OF TARSUS 


live in sins and to suffer, and not to know why we 
suffer.”1 “If then with a light word thou shalt 
destroy him, who with such infinite labour has been 
fashioned by thy command, to what purpose was he 
made? But now I will say: Concerning man in 
general (7.e. the Gentile world) thou knowest best,” 
and he turns to the question of Israel, which is a little 
more compassable.2 ‘Things have not turned out as 
the Almighty had wished—‘ ‘The Most High willed 
not that men should come to destruction ; but they— 
His creatures—have themselves defiled the Name of 
Him that made them, and have proved themselves 
ungrateful to Him who prepared lifefor them. ‘There- 
fore my judgment is now nigh at hand.” “IT will 
not concern myself,” so the word of God is suppoesd 
to say, ‘about the creation of those who have sinned, 
or their death, judgment, or perdition”; 4 God will 
concentrate His mind on the few righteous, and Ezra 
is advised to do the same. “* Do thou rather think of 
thine own case, and of them who are like thyself search 
out the glory. For for you is opened Paradise, planted 
the tree of life, the future Age prepared, plenteousness 
made ready, a City builded, a Rest appointed, good 
works established, wisdom preconstituted; the (evil) 
root is sealed up from you, infirmity from your path 
extinguished, and Death is hidden, Hades fled away, 
Corruption forgotten, sorrows passed away; and in 
the end the treasures of immortality are made manifest. 
Therefore ask no more concerning the multitude of 
them that perish.” > Even intercession for them is 
forbidden. So the mass of mankind are lost; the 
thoughtful Jew dismisses the matter—God knows 
about it, no one else can understand it; and God— 
God did not wish it and won’t think about it either ; 
“¢ perish then the multitude that was born in vain!” 

14 Ezra iv. 12. 2 4 Ezra vill. 14-16. 

34 Ezra vill. 60, 61. 44 Ezra vill. 38. 

8 4 Ezra vill. 51-55. 64 Ezra vil. 102-105 


THE CONSUMMATION 241 


But if for the Apocalyptist God’s victory is so 
miserably limited that God Himself cannot think of it, 
for the Apostle there was another prospect. He had, 
if our reconstruction is right, loved the Gentiles from 
boyhood; he had never quite shared the Jew’s “ ready 
and not unwilling consignment of the non-believer 
and the non-Jew to perdition and gloom” ;1 he had 
shared the Apocalyptist’s perplexity, and ‘“‘ suddenly 
there shined round about him a light from heaven.” 
““ By revelation he made known to me the mystery 
which in other ages was not made known to the sons 
of men, as it is now revealed unto his holy apostles 
and prophets by the Spirit, that the Gentiles should 
be fellow-heirs and of the same body, and partakers of 
his promise in Christ by the gospel,—whereof I was 
made a minister.» ‘The horrible cloud has rolled 
away, and ‘‘ God hath shined in our hearts.”? He 
has known in himself the joy of reconciliation with 
God, he has peace with God himself, and to him the 
unspeakable trust is given of preaching in all the Gentile 
world that God was in Christ reconciling the whole 
world to Himself. Was he the victim of delusion ? 
Then what was the meaning of the Christian church— 
the most glorious evidence of the power of God at 
work in the world, delivered from the power of darkness 
and translated into the Kingdom of His dear Son, 
who loved the church and gave himself for it? The 
church may have every defect that we have noted, on 
Paul’s observation, among the Corinthians ; it may be 
as futile and self-centred as we see it to-day; but it 
is better than what it replaces—and that surely is an 
apocalyptic sign in itself ; and it carries in its heart the 
conviction that it must be “according to Christ,” 
which is another sign of yet more significance; and, 
in any case, it has proved that God’s heart is large 

1C. G. Montefiore, Fudaism and St Paul, p. 56. 
2 Eph. ili. 5-7. #2) Conve Oe 
BeOS ..13 4 5 Eph. v. 25. 


242 PAUL OF TARSUS 


enough to contain mankind, and that is the best omen 
of all. 

So, putting on one side the outward lineaments of 
a figure on the clouds, surrounded by others in strange 
and unexpected form, we have in Paul’s writing and 
Paul’s conviction a new and more glorious Apocalyptic, 
founded upon fact—founded on the renewal of Paul’s 
own nature, on his peace with God, on God’s visible 
and demonstrated call of the Gentiles, on the passing 
away of old problems in a great light, on the moral 
change from darkness to light, from death to life, 
of men all over the world, on the infectious glad- 
ness of the redeemed, and on fresh evidence every 
day of Christ’s power to save. And what would be 
the end of it? Could there be any end but one—the 
capture of the whole world for Jesus Christ and im- 
mortal life? Could there be any limit to what God 
will do for Christ and in Christ, “‘ the image of the 
invisible God, the firstborn of all creation ; for by him 
were all things created . . . and for him; and he is 
before all things and by him all things consist. And 
he is the head of the body, the church; who is the 
beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in all 
things he might have the pre-eminence. For it 
pleased the Father that in him should all fulness dwell, 
and having made peace through the blood of his cross, 
by him to reconcile all things unto himself, whether 
things in earth, or things in heaven.” 1 ‘There is no 
limit to this reconciliation till all are reconciled, that 
Christ may be all and in all. Let the reader turn to 
the glowing and comprehensive pictures of the letters 
to the Colossians and the Ephesians, to the great 
prophecy of the final conquest of death (concentrating 
here on the great conception and not wandering off 
on the detail), to the eighth chapter of the letter to the 
Romans; let him realize that all this is based on ex- 
perience of the love of Christ and the power of God ; 

1 Col. i. 15-20. 


THE CONSUMMATION 243 


and, if here and there the phrase is borrowed, will he 
not feel that the Apostle knows of what he speaks and 
draws a picture worthy of God? ‘The love of Christ 
constrains us to the belief that he must reign; that 
the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for 
me, will pursue his work of reconciliation till he is 


indeed all and in all. 


pe a ie 
un 





INDEX OF BIBLICAL PASSAGES 


Genesis 
XVill. 25 
Rix27 

Exodus 


meee L 


XXXill. 17-23 . 


Deuteronomy 
1 ey a 
Psalms 
X1¥.:3 
xl. 
Gvl37. 
ex. P 
Cxvl. 


Proverbs 
iil. 4 
Xlv. 9 

Isaiah 
as ae 
aha 
mvs". 
eel 
Ixvi. 1-2 

Jeremiah 
we 
ort 31 


Foel 


no) 


aI 
Ais wy 
i 934 
eu ZO7 
- 54 
146 
106 
136 
$1230 
et ngo 
I51 

38 
amas 
SE LOO 
96, 220 
237 
Pes 
237 

y ie Np ry Bs 
229, 237 
7 zZO 


Matthew 
v. 17-20 
Ex. 23 
XXV. 
Mark 
Vill. 27-33 
Vlil. 30-31 
x. 47 
x1. 10 
icy 
Tics: 
Xi. 35-37 
X1V. 3 
Luke 
ill. 8 
Xlll. I 
XVlll. 12 
Fohn 
aie 
Salo 
XVi20i 
Acts 
i. 6-7 
ite 
il. ‘ 
ll. Q-II. 
ii. 46 
lil. II 
lil. 14-15 
ill. 20 


Waezeilowa aes 


PAGE 


areas 5 
30 
78 


eee 


202, 207 
205 
205 
28 
53 
205 
178 


36 
: 28 
antes fy, 
43 


107 
aa 220 


202 
8 
51 
28 
51 
51 
50 
50 
54 


246 


Acts—contd. 
iv. II 
v. I-II. 
v. 12 
Vzoe 
vars t 
¥-) 54739 
Vs 40.) 
vi. 7 
vi. II 
vi. 13 
vi. 15 
vil. 48-50 
vii. 58 . 
Viil. 3 
ix. 3-6. 
Ine 
ib Cac {a hla 
Xl. 19-26 
yas 
vd Fie 
Xill. I 
STO 
ey Ls 
sive 2s, 
re Oh 
xv. 36-40 
rs 72 
SiO, as 
Xvi. 7-9 
Xvi 0))/3 ; 
XVI s 22.37.30 
Vis : 
XVil. 28 ‘ 
XVIl. 32 
VAL, 3 
XVlll. 9 . 


103, 113, 185 


PAUL OF TARSUS 


PAGE 
Acts—contd. 
Bay. Ce XVili. II 
48 MIX. 
51 > ab oan come 
54 pb hv in 
48 XIXAGL 
57 EXT ene 
54 xx. 13 . 
51 pw AE ay: 
55 xxl. 26-27 
55, 153 yOAR LE ter 
60 p04 Bf 
56 xxi. 40. 
52 pond to 
Be XXli. 6-10 
62 SEM AEA 
26 XXll. 17-21 
95 Xxil. 18 
147 XXll. 20. 
95 9 0a HO Hoa 


49 POI Say 


‘aed O Sei. 
115 XX1ll. II 
127 XXili. 16 
173 XXiv. 26 
152 XXIV. 27 
177 Sevin ee 
154 XXV1. 4-5 

66 XXV1. 13-16 
103 XXVl. 17 
185 XXV1. 19 
126 XXVii. 2 
8 XXVll. 3 
17 XXVIl. 23 
PY OLY. XXVill. 30 
7,187 | Romans 


Li AR 


PAGE 


oi 
, mit pe 
a 

ey 

126 

115 

173 

15, 187 

0!) 

153 

173 

14, 115 

15, 24 

« hnOe 

42 

» 30 

103 

59 

126 

192 

° aa ae 
103, 113, 185 
° , 8 


15, 175 

©. 0 

115 

oi. eae 

“7, ee 

0 see 

94, 206 

ea is 

° ~ fie 
o | JOS sie 


* e I5 
° « 68 


INDEX OF BIBLICAL PASSAGES 247 


PAGE PAGE 

Romans—contd. Romans—contd. 
ho ° Wild: Vill. 34 ; azo 
al ae ‘ heed Vill. 35 ‘ oe 73 


MeO) « ‘ sper Vili. 35-39 ie 210 
li. 5-11. . CU ire, WIL a7 ois tds 235 
il. 7-9 . : e234 » ape : an TF 


il, 14-15 : ent Rehsey « : atin220 
8 fa ee LOD) 234 Mire Den\ 4 ; : fi 
Berl oot. A aL OF a LAI Ae : a LDA 
a ee : cdl He SEULEY x6 ; eV arhe. 
1 diy a . eo 7, RLILG-3Ag hits ele? 
Bs) - reo 7 Page : ae) 210 
MELO). ee tA0 ae (ey) We : if ZO 
miyz5., s ; 86, 208 Sin Th 0 ; Pei Ri20 


WaT 3 69, 106, 221 xi. 4-8 : wherG7 
roo ane : « 1869 wire 2s, : « f168 


ro!” : eet rah Ug. : pia a 
Wi it2\t. : ewes Mier Out, : «EGO 
oe Ce : Oe iP 2 Ef: : Aa Cay: 
Mikal ys ; aay, xlil. 6-7 : <MMELO 
vat : EAT EVE 4a : - 100 
Meas. : eae Evie. : SOO 
5 ae : 233 MiVy LIK. o's OG a2 20 
ates ie . BR tee: xiv. 16. ° aa iG 
pieces |, : Teun ZO SVs Rta seg) 8 
at eae : emo? Vi 208. = eG6 
Valier, |. 209 ts RR a) (#183 
Vill. Q-II we2to XVAAOts ‘ Sea 7G 
Vill. 15 : SVELOI yt ee : Hen aoe: 
Sy a : ae: EVIE Tit : 58, 179 
Vili. 19-22 . anos XVii, 75 1 ° em GZ 
vill. 22 : 28220 ZVI 7, V1 i21 : 

Vill. 24 : Wh Rk xvi. 14. ° CLL 
Vili. 29 ° 212 AV 2 he) ° . 8 
Vill. 30 ° 216 ui e2N ° - 190 
Vili. 31 ° - 194 | I Corinthians 

Vili. 32 ° e219 Ey ce eh a » “IOI 


PAUL OF TARSUS 


248 
PAGE 
1 Corinthtans—contd. 

1. 18 155 
i, 18-1. 3 ALY: 
1. 23 53, 155 
i. 24 115, 147) 215 
Li Ts 5 : 
Lei 15,20 
eat hae 184 
ll. 4-5 . 184 
TE SMe 145 
ll. 9 203 
W103 IIO 
ll. 14 : pie a Le}: 
ll. 16 169, 211, 213 
Lisagess oe MN eg 
lll. 10 9 
lil. II, 16 167 
lll. 17 SM 
1 23 216, 220 
1¥i2 100 
Iv. 3 100 
Iv. 9 13 
lv. 13 177 
hos ER) Ue 
vi. eh rESe 
vi. 7 SOME 
vi. IO-II 2 EGG 
vi. II . 166 
vl. 19 21 
V1. 20 214 
Vil. 157 
vil. 1, 8 : me se, 
abo Gn . het OZ 
Vill. 4-9 : eso 
Vill. II. : patted ® 
Wulls) 52", ; 214 
ix. 16 99, 211, 214 


PAGE 
I Corinthtians—contd. 

1x. 17 95 
1x. 19 99 
1X. 19-23 IQI 
ix, (2a 96 
pb se. 114 
1X. 23 115 
IX. 24 II 
IX, Brat 99 
X. 2-4 . 32 
X. 20-21 136 
eR ISI 
3 9 
x32 150 
9 220 
xl. 14 ‘14, 22 
Xl. 22 ISI 
X1. 30 163 
Xil. : 04 LOF 
x8 52, 159, 219 
xiil. ° suo 
xlil. I « . 28g 
xiil. 8 On bs 
XIll. 9, 12 « 1207 
» aR PL ahi hh a 
AVG Os 2c oh 
xiv. 18. 105, 159, 186 
xlv. aos, 26, 29 Pe te) 
xv. 10 mae 3 
xv. 15 ° eo: he 
Xv. 19 zee 
XV. 25 225, 236 
Xv. 28 ° . 2aG 
XV: 30, 42s Meet, 
phi 8 gal ‘ ot Eee 
X33 is ; 0 em 
BV 45757) - 235 


INDEX OF BIBLICAL PASSAGES 249 
PAGE PAGE 
1 Corinthians—contd. 2 Corinthians—contd. 


aye”. I EMS TA Tait ais CUBR eS 24 7 
xv.57-58 . $4 7305 VA Ohies ° EN MEY is 


<vt.10). : ae ty A vi. 7 -\) 184 
XVl. 21. : ator Wide aes Ban i eeu By 
ie VIL Sits : 84, 184 

2 Corinthians vil. 7, 13 ; Reinet 
18-9 . spiel kel OA vill.g . ° 1/4200 
ers : Ry LBA. Vilt2a0, : ENR Hy 
2 i CRA oneal fes L720 Lows ons 215 
a : Seay x. 2-5 . IO 
ae PUPIOO SOO xX. 3-5 . 189 
1. 17-18 ° wa) LBZ esd e's : WP Lod 
ee |)" ° aM ED vids 99, 116, 157 
6 @ ; 41.206 ly fe é see 
ll. 12-13 ; eB poy Ari toy 183 
BEL An 108, 184, 215 mayo eal 220 
eG s : aU LOO <0 12 
ae : ‘ 9 x. 16 95 
ed oe Ae ao LOZ LOR x1. 6 : A bo 
i oh A : kOe xl. 7-II : Bae Be 
Baer 7". : AWS es) x1. 8-10 ; AD tp 
1.18 . aod 16 xl. 14 : - 206 
Bayt s sad OY M24 th MP rhe ort 
avez IOI, 102 Xl. 23-27 : BOI a 
iv. 5 ‘ OO Blue S20 ais Bens Wk 
iv. 6 93, 102, 241 » as a 00 
lv. 7 : or ibibeg2 MT ; oink 
iv. 7-II : aa Xil. I-10 : see 
TO ..'6 : Pyne tay icant PN tadns Aas 
WWtO° : “OO Sis si uhikZ SULOO 
re : 7A aR te ke xi. 8 ff. : Beale 
ae ° Ae sareh ey . «184 
os © ae : Tied. vate ike iM ° Ph Gra 
io ae ZOO. 2 0A Xl. II . ° a! 1083 
“hh ; BIS Farr, STON. LOR LRT a8 
wD... « : a eZO TUE TOK, ° #020 


250 PAUL OF TARSUS 


PAGE PAGE 
Galatians Galatians—contd. 

leat, he ° e 209 Yi Gait ° o SOR 
TALON | ae ° - 183 Vl. II-I4 « 190 
USED Nae : ieee Vines ee . 2 LSS 
tenn. : .24,45 | Ephesians 
Wa is Be BAY Re Ltn ge 0: OC aes 
1. 15-16 67, 94, 211 1. 4, 10 ; BN dts 
Big tele 42, 68, 220 ibs ° ms 
i. 17-18 ; Ss tf reine : | OF 
‘hvto : CESS 1. 17-18 ° *| LOS 
il. ; : PLANe 7 ll. I ° cee 
Wah th’. : mea At S1ans We ics Corz Te, 
cae SOA TOO MB Ay ii. 5-6 . : + ene 
ii. 9, 6, 7 : eo? vi gs LR : 83, 166 
li. 14 : eo il. 12) LO. foam 2 Non 
LULA, Gs : . 9 9 ae : 2 ALOe 
HUD 6 sk Scene 1 U7), We . Adis 
IY. 420) 10.20, 97, 1553 208, EOS hi : - 166 

210; 212,.274 ili. 5-6 . : a ee 
lil. I 89 ill. 5-7 . : ot tea 
lil. 5 a Oi LUND awe .) 21OR2 ie 
lll. 13 54 THEA Grad i : ree 
ili. 16 32 IDPs ° say 
lil. 19 70 FA Ob re . Ba C8 
lll. 28 20 IVT . ae 
Iv. 4 a MSLG LVL. : . 6" 
iv. 6 161, 219 VM. ke . Pa i 
Ley as ye yo wes ie RLOG Tye the , oC 
Vey . Fares TVG une . ., ee 
Iv. 9-10 = Mi is 8 Ty U2d ve : . “10% 
iv. 13-14. Weak Me UPA : 26, 168 
Iv. 13-15 . hs rg Prelate ° - 168 
Weis 2 ea > tg bre’ Vs Adie ° ‘2 
Iv. 19 - AA COR MLS: ee ° ie 
v. ; ; eal Ce Wes fits ° 26, 241 
5 Ne ° - 54 | Philippians 
Veen, 4 Bort hep i. 6 J : °* ae 


INDEX OF BIBLICAL PASSAGES 


PAGE 


ager ete f000- 
1. 7 
i. Q-IO 
i. 10 
121 
Wee 3 


i. 
il. 
il. 
il. 
il. 
il. 
ii. 


ill. 
iii. 
ili. 
ili. 
iil. 
ili. 
ie 
ili. 
ili. 
iil. 
Iv. 
iv. 
iv. 
iv. 
civ: 
Iv. 


I 


O; 9): 
ere 45 
‘corte 
T5 

25 

I 

2 

5 
a. 
to De 
12 
12-13 
12-16 
17 

21 

3 

5 

Z 


10-19 
Il 
12 


Colossians 


is 


Pde pete pete patio pte 
° 


5 : 
Bait, 
. 12-13 
. 15-20 
a a 


20 e 


seh 9 
. sual OF 
° nae 20 
° 210 
185 
210 
179 
220 
209 
220 
165 
17/9 
216 
192 
“7, 24 

77 

ZI Leet? 
17] 

166 

225 

“ghd SO 

68, 173, 216 
178, 179 
elo 

- 80, 93> 975 
106, 189 

176 

20 


Veh 


06, 


: a7 0 
ni Le dels 


: M24 ST 
24.2 
220 


25 


251 
PAGE 
Colosstans—contd. 
1. 24 ° Heel 
1. 26 145 
While? Ll OF 
11. 8 ak 157, 158 Zi 
Hes We eat 
ll. 14 25, 89 
lll. 3 HREQS 
ill. II 20 
lero 176 
lll. 19 UML ET 
iv..4 D7 Salo 
Iv. 7 GLO 
iv. 10 LPO 
Verio gue : 8 
iv. 18 105, 193 
I Thesalonians 
34 167 
iW gt 166 
1-7 IQI 
ll. 9 is 
ay 175 
lv. 14-17 Me 
eee 26).009 
2 Thessalonians 
1. 7-8 78 
1.7-I0. 252 
iil. 6-14 235 
il. 8 15 
ill. 17 105 
1 Timothy 
1. 4 : MLR O 
Tae) ° at OS 
lv. 2 83 
IVE Aceves 157 
Ae ais ° als 
WiC ora ° IOI 


252 


2 Timothy 
yy 
Witz 
Es Fe 
ll. 3-4. 
Tats 
li. I-13 
TST he 
HS epee 
iv. 10 
Iv. 14 
iv. 17 


Titus 
Ca a ge 
Philemon 
2 
23 
24 
Hebrews 
ie 
1 Peter 
ll. 7 
EL Ree 
Revelation 
Vv. 9-13 
Xi L7 
KV. 3 
oa Fah HE 


Baruch 
rh oa A oe 
MTV 
XV. 5 
li. 7-10 


PAUL OF TARSUS 


PAGE 


193 
104 
193 

10 
237 
161 
237 

32 
181 
237 


103, 104, II5, 


186, 237 
. Pena ted 


e e 179 
, Rail tec, 
‘ a HAL 


208 


205 


o WhOI 
161 
161 


82 


Baruch—contd. 
liii. 3-5 
liv. 15-19 
lvi. 6-12 
Ixili. 3-5 

Ecclestasticus 
XXXVIl. 14 

Enoch 
Vili. I 
ix. 6 
x.4-6 . 
xiii. 
XXXV1l. . 
re 
liv. I 
Ixxxviil. I 

4 Ezra 
111, °36° 5 
iv. II 
iv. 12 
Vii. 2I-22 
Wises 
Vil. 23-24 
Wiis 
Vil. 47 . 
Vil. 102-105 
Vili. 

VIL S ig 
Vill. 14-16 
vill. 38. 
Vill. 51-55 
vill. 60-61 
XH1./35 "4 

2 Maccabees 

TVs 


85, 


8I 
8I 
8I 
81 


66 


127 
127 
127 
127 
202 
202 


127 
127 


239 
239 
240 
239 
239 
239 


239 
240 


239 
240 
240 
240 
240 


144 


It 


GENERAL INDEX 


AMUSEMENTS, IO 

Ancestry, 7 fi. 

Antinomianism, 155 

Apocalypse, -yptic, 40, 44, 
50, 85, 161, 201, 204, 207, 
209, 223 ff. 

Apuleius, 98, 130, 169 

Aristarchus, 174 

Aristotle, 103, 119, I71 

Arrian, 56 

Athletics, 10 

Augustine, 46, 61, 71, 147, 
171 

Aurelius, Marcus, 97, 149 

Authority of Old ‘Testa- 
ment, 32 


Baptism, III, 156, 161, 163, 
213 

Bishops, 160 

Boxing, 11 f., 99 

Boyhood, 8 f. 

Bunyan, 65, 95, 101, I12, 
188, 196, 206 


Czsar, Julius, 124, 125 
Calvin, 171 

Celsus, 120, 149, 190 
Christology, 26, 199 f., 216 


Chronology, 27, 54, 55 
Chrysostom, Dio, 5, 6 


Church, Jerusalem, 48 ff. 

Church, The, Chap. VII. 

Cicero, 3, 120, 129, 163, 164, 
E7501 7755100 

Circumcision, 151 f., 164 

Citizenship, 7 ff., 29, 126 

Claudian, 123 

Clemen, 127, 164 

Clement of Alexandria, 18, 
00,142, 2075213 

Clement of Rome, 166 

Conduct, 23 

Conscience, 22 f., 39 

Conversion, 61 ff., 78, go, 
94, 205 

Courage, 193 

Creation, New, 107 

rosso Christ, 1634 £068. 
87 f., 103, 110 

Crucifixion, 61 ff., 78, go, 
94, 205 

Cyprian, 56, 73, 163 


Damascus, Chap. III. 

Dio Chrysostom, 5, 6 

Discipline, Church, 159 

Dispersion, Jews of the, 137 f. 

EpucaTion and_ training, 
Tati 2aweo.ts 

Effects of sin, 41 ff. 


253 


254 


Egypt, 131, 173 
Epictetus, 12, 120 
Epimenides, 18 
Episcopacy, 160 
Erasmus, 57, 194 
Eschatology, 224 ff. 
Eusebius, 122 

Evil, source of, 41 


Famity life, 13 

Food taboo, 40 
Forgiveness, 36, 69 
Francis of Assissi, 95 
Friendship, 11, 115, 174 f. 


Gat tio’s date, 55 

Gamaliel, 15, 21, 27, 45, 40, 
57 £., 70, 204 

Games, Io 

Gentiles, 42, 45, 59, 70 

God, 84, 87, 90 

Greek culture, 17-19 

Guidance, 56 

Gymnasium, Io, 17 


HELLENISM, 32, 45 

Hellenistic life, 16 f. 

Herodotus, 56, 99, 119, 120, 
125,531 

Horace, 50, 129, 171, 203 


Icnatius, 160, 163 
Immortality, 231 
Inspiration, 32 f. 
Isocrates, 119, 143 
Israel, 69 


PAUL OF TARSUS 


JEROME, 28 

Jerusalem, Chap. IT. 

Jerusalem Church, 48 ff. 

Jesus as “ Lord,” 96 

Joseph Justus, 8 

Josephus, 28, 139 

Judaism, 21, 24, 29, 31, 34 f., 
144, 151 f. 

Judgment, 45, 86 

Julian, 165 

Justin, 53, 56, 140, 141, 153 

Juvenal, 58, 120, 129 


Lancuacg, 13 f., gt f., 135, 
162 

Law, the, 21, 35, 54, 56, 75 
CAN Ot He) 

Legalism, 39, 44 

Liberty, 96 

Lord, Jesus as, 96 

Lord’s Supper, 163 f., 213 

Luke, St, 15, 47,54) segues 
f,, 175, 4,055 eon 

Luther, 46, 57, 74, 76, 171, 
198, 208, 214 


Macic, 150, 156 
Manetho, 131 
Mannerisms, 177 f. 
Marcion, 32 
Marcus Aurelius, 97, 149 
Marriage, 157 
Menander, 17, 18, 130 
Messiah, 36 f., 40 ff., 53, 78, 
199 ff., 231 
Metaphor, 8 f., go, 212 
Monism, 79 


GENERAL INDEX 


Monotheism, 35, 79, 144, 
217 

Mystery religions, 111 f., 
Beh i, 156 

Mysticism, 212 f. 


NatTuRE, 22, 23 


Osepience, Chap. V. 
Old Testament, 32 f. 
Origen, 121 


PAGANISM, 133 

Paul and Thekla, 171 

Heace, (93, 106 

Peripatetics, 140 

Persecutions, 24, 52 

Persius, 8, 20 

Pharisaism, 29.f., 35,76 £. 

rol, 325823) 144, 151 

Pilgrims, 27, 28 

Pindar, 58, 127 

Plato, 5, 17, 38, 45, 72, 74, 
oesO: 20,132,134, 146, 
Tyigtoos 223, 224 

Pliny the elder, 123, 124 

Pliny the younger, 161 

Puutarens «7, < EZ, 127,120, 
16 

Polybius, 120 

Polytheism, 79 

Poppaea, 140 

Presbyterate, 160 

Propitiation, 85 

Prudentius, 125 

Punishment, 85, 86 

Purpose, God’s, 117, 237 


255 


Razssinic Judaism, 35 ff., 
75, 86 

Reconciliation, 92 

Repentance, 86 

Resurrection, 45, 54, 57, 68, 
85, 199, 231 

Rhetoric, 19 

Righteousness, 43, 69, 72 ff., 
Chap. IV. 


SACRAMENTS, I61 ff. 

Seneca, 20, 129, 130, 134 

Sibylline Oracles, 152 

Bi ay din ate ft 46 6077 
79 H., 145 f. 

Slavery, 9, 97 ff., 179 

Social position (Paul’s), 7 f. 

Socrates and daimontion, 66 

Sophocles, 227 

Spirit, Holy, 20, 
218 f. 

Stadium, II 

Secor dOsuh 21) RG tedib Os 
204. 

Stoics and Stoicism, 19 ff., 
32, 97, 117, 134, 140, 165, 
215 

Strabo, 5, 6, 125 

Style, Paul’s, 194 

Suetonius, 125 

SUITE Ta Zhe 

Synagogue, 51, 161 


TOS hi. 


Tasoo, food, 40 
Tacitus, 128 
Tarsus, Chap. I, 
Tatian, 139 
Temple, 51 


256 PAUL OF TARSUS 


Terminology, 73 f. Universauity of gospel, 115 
Tertius, 190 vmep-, 178, 195 
Tertullian, 60, 94, 111 

24) 10K VARRO, 7 


Theatre, 12, 17 ste. 
Ae e Vegetarianism, 157 
Theophrastus, 129 Virgil, 124, 141, 203 
Theosophy, 157 a8 
nth Visions, 113, 185 f., 205 £. 
Thucydides, 26 
Titus, 154, 175 Vocabulary, 114 
Tongues, speaking with, 105, 
158, 185 £. WESLEY, 74, 158, 217 
Trade (Paul’s), 15 
Travel, 125 XENOPHON, 5, 10 


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